faetal on 2/2/2012 at 13:41

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Now I'm torn. I can't play it until May anyway as I am on a placement a few hundred miles from my lovely PC. Part of me wants to check back and see how you enjoy the demo, but a bigger part of me wants to ignore what anyone thinks until I've played it. It sounds dumb, but I've actually stopped enjoying games before now because I've read someone else's take on it and then suddenly started noticing a tonne of flaws I'd previously not noticed.

henke on 2/2/2012 at 16:04

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Did the tutorial. Tried the actual mission and got all my guys killed pretty much straight away. Will play it again after dinner. For now here's some quick impressions.

Good:
-Customization. You get a dozen or so settings for when you want the game to auto-pause. (on spotting enemy, on running out of ammo, etc.) You also get to disable the "kill cam" if you so wish.
-Lots of control over your merc's movements. Run, aim, crouch, prone. You can even issue orders to a merc that DEPENDS on another mercs actions. For instance you can tell a merc not to open fire before his buddy also is in position and has a line of sight.
-Interface and hotkeys was smooth and felt natural, except for one thing...

Bad:
-Doesn't seem to be a button for selecting all your units. You have to shift-click them all in turn! Seems like there really should be one so I might just be overlooking it.
-Team ladder climbing. Holy shit this was a clown-act to behold! When a mercenary gets to a ladder he unequips his weapon before starting to climb. The only problem with that is that when you order your whole team to climb a ladder and they all arrive at once they will be bumping eachother out of the way of the ladder which means they REEQUIP their weapon and run towards the ladder again, bumping another merc who has NOW unequiped his gun and is trying to climb the ladder. This just happened in the tutorial for me once and after some fussing around all the mercs had climbed the ladder but I can see it being a real source of frustration if your dudes start bumbling around like idiots in the heat of battle.

So bad it's good:
The healing-animation looks like the mercenary is kneading invisible pizza dough.

Don't know about this one:
-No fog of war. Not that I mind. Knowing what kind of resistance you can expect to meet in a location before you rush in will make planning easier. Would be nice if there was an option to turn it on though.

henke on 2/2/2012 at 17:34

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Gave the mission another try, it went a bit better this time. Mainly because I realized that you can't just tell your units to shoot at an enemy and expect them to keep shooting at that enemy. No. Tell them to shoot at an enemy and they will shoot at him once. You have to rack up a bunch of shoot-orders if you want them to shoot at him until he is dead. Not sure if that's such a great design-choice. Sure it worked in the earlier JA-games where you had to be economical with your actionpoints, but here it would make more sense if your units just kept on shooting. It would also be nice if my units would open fire on sight, without me having to explicitly tell them to do so. You even gotta tell your guys to reload their guns if they run out of ammo! Talk about micromanagement. I never played JA2, only 1 and "Deadly Games", and that was a long time ago. Maybe you had to micromanage your guys there too, I don't remember. But I prefer Frozen Synapse which lets me stick to managing the big picture stuff and not have to worry about whether any of my dudes are running into battle with an empty clip.

That said, I did have fun planning my attacks. As it looks now I defenitely will be picking up "Back in Action" at some point. Likely during the next Steam Sale.

faetal on 29/2/2012 at 15:21

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Right. Last two times I went home for the weekend, I fired this up and played it for a good few hours.

The Good
It feels like JA to a decent extent. Lots of setting up positions and having to re-do some parts due to sloppy planning. The locations have been re-vamped, but feel somewhat familiar, ditto the mercs. The guns are decent and the real time plan and go system is, while not as ultimately strategic as fully turn-based, does feel a bit more natural and doesn't bother me.

The Bad
No fog of war kind of takes the suspense out a lot. It's good not to have to scour the map or end up going in entirely the wrong direction for ages to find that last guy you need to kill, but knowing where all enemies are at all times also removes an element of suspense I feel was key to JA2. You can never (unless you suck at strategy) end up ambushed by the enemy or wander blindly into horrific situations because of accidentally making a noise in stealth mode etc.. Also, you can now throw grenades at enemies that none of your team has sighted, which is a bit silly. Map level actions (repair / train / militia / doctor / etc) are gone, replaced with real time equivalents, which makes repair REALLY laborious (you have to inventory swap all of the items you want repaired with your mechanic, then he has to equip them plus a tool box, and only guns seem to be repairable, not armour, which is frustrating), healing is fine, but militia is suddenly an annoyance, requiring you to physically hand a weapon to each available local (number available depends on sector / town loyalty), meaning that you now feel loathe to discard any weapon you find, instead pack-ratting them round so you can arm the locals. The map-based system in JA2 was fine as it was, I feel they dropped the ball here. Also, as you mentioned, racking up shoot orders gets very tedious. You can't even hold the button down, so if you want to take up to 10 attempts at a head shot, you need to click the head 10 times and if you move the cursor a bit while doing this and it clicks the body, you delete that order and then carry on clicking the head. Clunkayyyy!

The Ugly
The new merc face avatars look worse than the sprite original and the voice re-works don't have quite the character of the originals. Also, a lot of additional useless inventory junk seems to be floating aorund, presumably to add realism to the game or whatever (oh great, I found some rotting food in this skip), but it just annoys, especially as in the original, you could combine a lot of seemingly useless items into better things, so you find yourself wondering if you should be sending it back to Drassen on Ira.

Overall, I'd say worth a go if you're into JA2. Go into it with a lenient attitude and it will reward. I'll update as I progress in case it gets worse or better. Though I've written more negative than positive, I'd say I still like the game and most of the positive just aren't worth mentioning as they are elements which were present in JA2, so don't go by amount of negatives vs positives alone as I'd say it's still a 6.5/10, increasing to 7.5/8.0 when you're enjoying the moment.