faetal on 2/2/2012 at 13:41
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 14:47
Hah, yeah I know what that's like. And on the other hand, if you hear too many great things about it before you start playing you might be too hyped up over it and end up getting disappointed. :p
I'm downloading the demo right now. The Steam version of the demo didn't seem to be downloadable yet so I used one of the mirrors linked to on RPS.
edit: downloaded! installing!
henke on 2/2/2012 at 16:04
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.
faetal on 2/2/2012 at 16:52
Seems I can't help myself.
I would hope some of the clunkier stuff you mention might be patched out.
The fog of war thing is a crying shame mind. For me, part of JA is the tension of having to edge your way around the map without knowing where is safe and where is an ambush. Taking that away might kill it for me. I might write a letter to the devs soaked with my own tears and hope they implement it back in as an option. Otherwise, I'll cross my fingers to snapping tension in the hopes that someone will mod it. They've got until May.
henke on 2/2/2012 at 17:34
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 3/2/2012 at 10:06
Here's hoping the gap between release and when I can actually play it (about 3 months) is enough for patches and mods to have made it a touch more slick.
faetal on 29/2/2012 at 15:21
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.
henke on 25/7/2012 at 14:15
Bought this 2 days ago, 11 hours into it now, and this is what I got to show for it:
Inline Image:
http://img577.imageshack.us/img577/2306/2012072500002.jpgStill a long way to go before Arulco is liberated I'm afraid. This game is hard as nails. Fun though, even if it does have it's share of annoying flaws. I've spent the past hour trying to get into the city of Alma, failing twice. The first time because I clearly didn't plan it out enough, the second time because my Medic got gunned down, which would ordinarily be fine since I got 2 other mercs with Medical-ratings high enough to revive fallen comrades. But this time we were down to our last medkit and the Medic had that one equiped. You can send another merc over to rifle through his inventory but they can't take an item away from a fallen merc if that merc has that item equipped, and he can't unequip that item if he's dying.
So there we were, bleeding to death while the last medkit was in the clutches of a guy who was dying. Ofcourse we could've revived him, but we needed the medkit for that. Catch goddamn 22. I had the rest of my crew search the bodies of downed enemies, but no medkits were found. There were more dead baddies lying around in the battlefield ahead, but sending mercs out there to search meant they'd be in the line of fire of the remaining baddies, lying in wait. But the clock was ticking on our downed medic-friend, so I had no choice but to send my guys out there, aaaaaaand...
Inline Image:
http://img845.imageshack.us/img845/7194/2012072500003.jpgThat didn't work so well. The game is still fun, mind you. Just difficult as hell to a newbie. I think I have devised a strategy now though. First get outta Alma, get back up north, hold the positions we currently have liberated, get some rifles for the 2 members of my crew who still only have handguns. Load up on medkits as well. Then we wait out the arrival of the latest addition to our crew, a high-class merc who should be arriving in another half-day. After that we march south again.
Inline Image:
http://img525.imageshack.us/img525/5848/2012072500001.jpgHere's we're sneaking up on a roadblock outside of Alma, this part took me a lot of retries before I got it.
Inline Image:
http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/4887/2012072400005.jpgThe audioindicators lets you know if there are enemies nearby even if you can't see them.
Inline Image:
http://img52.imageshack.us/img52/7048/2012072400009.jpgThis is some Mexican Standoff shit right here.