Home » BIT COMPOSER GAMES » Jagged Alliance: Back in Action (by Coreplay) » Demo review of JA2:BiA
| Demo review of JA2:BiA[message #297775]
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Fri, 03 February 2012 20:21 
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 Finn |
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Messages:85
Registered:October 2008
Location: Sweden |
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Hey, so I just played through the Tutorial and the Demo mission, and I would like to share my thoughts and observations with you guys.
- First thing I noticed was that the game was hard because it was really difficult to get a grip of the controls (someone said unintuitive and I agree). However once I figured it out it was a piece of cake. This mainly because of the guard-mode-thingamajig. Those of you who played Fallout:Tactics know exactly what I mean. In that game you could set an aggression level where your squaddies would fire if their to-hit-chance went above the threshold you decided. There was also an overwatch function. Let me just say that you can faceroll your way through the first four levels in Fallout:Tactics because of this.
- Second thing I noticed was that (like many others have commented) the terrain screws up your line of fire, and you basically have to move the camera around for a while to find that sweet spot. However it does really account for terrain and obstacles in a nice way and I actually raised an eyebrow when I managed to get a shot off between the trunk and a thick branch of a fallen tree, and the trace was drawn to show the path of the bullet. I think much of it would be solved if they changed the camera, so that you could move it around more, zoom in and out more and with simpler controls.
- Apparently you can't shoot at people if you're lying down and they are standing in front of you. This makes for veeeery dangerous melee as one of Deidranna's soldiers happily trudged through Magic and Lynx using just the butt of his rifle. Basically I regard it as a bug that needs fixing. The guy coming around the corner should obviously have had his feet exploding into a fine pink mist from the two assault rifles opening fire.
- The "plan & go" system is a very nice thought even though it currently makes the game too easy (or at least the demo). I like it a lot, and how you can synchronise the mercs actions to some extent. However I find it badly bugged. Sometimes the mercs will just ignore your orders (such as sneak up to the corner of a house and provide fire support to their comrades) and sit on their asses while their friends are being made into swiss cheese.
- It's annoying that you can't climb houses or blow things up on other places than pre-determined spots. But not only that. One of the biggest issues I have with JA2 is still abscent in BiA: You still can't climb in and out through windows. Seriously! How hard can it be? The lack of bullet tracers is a non-issue in my opinion as it just gives you too much information.
There are many more things to say about the demo of "Jagged Alliance 2: Back in Action", but I'll stop here with one more thing in closing:
"Jagged Alliance 2: Back in Action" feels flat. The socialising, constant bickering or flirting between the mercs, their comments on everyday things, and their reactions to each other's comments. All abscent, with the exception of one comment from Fidel and one from Lynx. It feels bland and boring, and feels like it's trying to be more serious. Lynx seems particularly bitter when he comments on a kill with "I used to make sick jokes about that, but I've seen too many friends die that way. It's not funny anymore." Basically the feel of JA2 is not there and I'm glad they released the demo so I don't waste money on this.
[Updated on: Fri, 03 February 2012 20:28] by Moderator Report message to a moderator
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Corporal 1st Class
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| Re: Demo review of JA2:BiA[message #297813]
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Sat, 04 February 2012 09:17 
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| mrgray |
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Messages:4
Registered:December 2011 |
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HanakinI don't consider 'plan and go' a good system.
Try to check all checkboxes in Options->Gameplay, game will pause after every important situation like no order\enemy killed\merc wounded. After that game actually feels like turn based and P&G show its maximum potential. However with no FoW so powerfull sistem makes a game so easy.
And sneaking actually works, try to use Magic with silenced Glock to clear some lone guards. And i think that melee is good as it is in demo, u cant actually shot enemies, who stubing you and it crates a very interesting potential for melee specialists.
After mastering P$G demo feels like JA2 for me (simplified and casual of course), but removed Fog of War is "You shall not pass" point for me.
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Civilian
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| Re: Demo review of JA2:BiA[message #297818]
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Sat, 04 February 2012 10:54
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| Fozzie |
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Messages:183
Registered:April 2010
Location: Germany |
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One should really distinguish between "Plan & Go" and just "Smart Pause". The catch about P&G is the chaining and intertwining of orders, and I for my part in the whole demo didn't run into a single situation where this would have been remotely helpful, let alone necessary. It mostly just overcomplicated things and was prone to a lot of mistakes due to the sloppy controls. So when I actually tried using it, I spent more time deleting misplaced orders than actually "planning". It also would only make sense when enemies are very near by, but not aware of your mercs and thus not moving. But that never happened, once even a single enemy moves and/or changes his facing, the whole set of commands goes down the crapper.
About the problem with "point blank" encounters I noticed two game mechanics that seem to rule each other out, resulting in that "catatonic" behaviour of mercs:
1) When an enemy is close enough and you issue an order to attack, your merc doesn't shoot, but stands up (i.e. changes his stance) and clubs the enemy over the head with the butt of his rifle.
2) The "Guard Mode" forces the mercs to "hold their ground" (i.e. keep their stance).
So if an enemy is too close and your merc is crouching/lying in Guard Mode, rule 1) prevents him from shooting, cause it wants him to stand up and go into melee, but rule 2) doesn't allow him to stand up, rendering him unable to attack in melee at the same time.
I can also agree about the uselessness of grenades. They just take ages to explode after being thrown, every enemy in the vicinity has already legged it to a safe distance, once it finally goes off. I guess there might be some situations where you could exploit this, like throwing a grenade from one side into a room to scare them off to the other side where the rest of your squad sits in waiting outside the door to shoot them. But I don't think that was the idea behind grenades...
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Staff Sergeant
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| Re: Demo review of JA2:BiA[message #297828]
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Sat, 04 February 2012 13:58
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| mrgray |
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Messages:4
Registered:December 2011 |
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FozzieThe catch about P&G is the chaining and intertwining of orders, and I for my part in the whole demo didn't run into a single situation where this would have been remotely helpful, let alone necessary.
It works great in CQB, pretty usefull in hard exterior with alot of cover.
Fozzie So when I actually tried using it, I spent more time deleting misplaced orders than actually "planning".
Its all about lack of experiense in a game, not a game fault.
Fozzie
1) When an enemy ...
2) The "Guard Mode" ...
You can always try to run away from enemy with knife and let other put of the team shoot him. It was a JA2 issue, that u can shoot into head with 100% acc enemy , who stubing you, i'd like to see someone doing such thing in real life lol, so imho that part of a game is fine. And Guard mode is pretty useless, i dont see any point in using it. Pause works fine with all autopause options checked.
Actually a game is not so bad, only reason because i will not buy it because of lack of FoW (finished demo mission 3 times).
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Civilian
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| Re: Demo review of JA2:BiA[message #297829]
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Sat, 04 February 2012 14:13
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| Finn |
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Messages:85
Registered:October 2008
Location: Sweden |
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mrgrayAnd i think that melee is good as it is in demo, u cant actually shot enemies, who stubing you and it crates a very interesting potential for melee specialists.
You should be able to shoot people that approaches. I tried the demo again yesterday and three of my four mercs were wiped as they sat kneeling with their guns on full auto pointed at a door when they got swarmed by four soldiers they knew were coming, through that very door.
FozzieAbout the problem with "point blank" encounters I noticed two game mechanics that seem to rule each other out, resulting in that "catatonic" behaviour of mercs:
1) When an enemy is close enough and you issue an order to attack, your merc doesn't shoot, but stands up (i.e. changes his stance) and clubs the enemy over the head with the butt of his rifle.
2) The "Guard Mode" forces the mercs to "hold their ground" (i.e. keep their stance).
So if an enemy is too close and your merc is crouching/lying in Guard Mode, rule 1) prevents him from shooting, cause it wants him to stand up and go into melee, but rule 2) doesn't allow him to stand up, rendering him unable to attack in melee at the same time.
Ah, that explains it. Because I've had them respond and stand up to fight in melee as well on the rare occasion I turn off guard mode. Bug confirmed.
Quote:I can also agree about the uselessness of grenades. They just take ages to explode after being thrown, every enemy in the vicinity has already legged it to a safe distance, once it finally goes off. I guess there might be some situations where you could exploit this, like throwing a grenade from one side into a room to scare them off to the other side where the rest of your squad sits in waiting outside the door to shoot them. But I don't think that was the idea behind grenades...
In my experience the grenades in the game have a very large blast radius (larger than the actual explosion) and frag grenades often hit people with shrapnel quite far away, like in reality. Gas grenades are used for area denial, while tear gas and flashbangs are used to flush out room campers (pop a couple of flashbangs in the room and then storm it). In this sense I actually think the grenades work well and realistically. My only issue is that you can't throw them very far, but that may be due to the mercs that was chosen for me in the demo. And the time they take to explode is just right. Count the seconds.  It's normal to lose sense of time in real time when action starts. The human brain works like that, and a second is a looong time for a brain.
Ok, two more observations of the demo:
I see a lot of Fallout-inspiration in the demo. Does anyone know if the designers had anything to do with Fallout:Tactics for example at some point? What I'm thinking about are the numerous items you can find. Sure you can eat many of them but some I just don't see a use for. Basically when my mercs started finding all these items I just thought "..just like the old Fallout games.."
The "plan & go" system has one big flaw: You can't read the terrain right. In old JA2 you had to move carefully one step at a time and check your angles at every step, like sneak up to a rock (too high to shoot over prone), sit up (now able to shoot over but enemy instead shielded by a trashcan), turn left and lie down to fire (another enemy shows up), and so on. With the "plan & go" system you que several commands based on you having read the terrain correctly which is hard because of the limitations, primarily of the camera angle. Like for example I have my mercs crawl prone behind a low ridge, but apparently there was no ridge and the enemies open up on them. This turns it into a reflex workout when you sit on the edge of your seat ready to "PRESS SPACE! PRESS SPACE! STOP! GO BACK! SHOOT! DO SOMETHING! DON'T JUST CRAWL AROUND IN YOUR OWN BLOOD! YOU'RE GETTING SHOT! STOP! PRESS SPACE!" and that's a flaw.
mrgrayYou can always try to run away from enemy with knife and let other put of the team shoot him.
Yeah, I guess you shouldn't trust your mercs to act rationally. Just take control of them instead. "No dude. You're getting rifle butted. It's time to skedaddle".
mrgrayIt was a JA2 issue, that u can shoot into head with 100% acc enemy , who stubing you, i'd like to see someone doing such thing in real life lol, so imho that part of a game is fine.
Yeah, because shooting someone in the head with 100% accuracy when they're standing beside you and you're prone is the same thing as not reacting when you're guarding a door with a fully automatic assault rifle and enemies that you are expecting because you heard them coming enter through that same door. No dude. That is clearly bugged.
mrgrayAnd Guard mode is pretty useless, i dont see any point in using it. Pause works fine with all autopause options checked.
You can't seriously argue that it's not bugged because it's useless and there's no point in using it.
- "Damn, my car broke down."
- "Meh, cars are useless. All they do is ruin the environment. Buy shoes and walk instead."
Buying shoes doesn't fix the car.
[Updated on: Sat, 04 February 2012 14:44] by Moderator Report message to a moderator
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Corporal 1st Class
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| Re: Demo review of JA2:BiA[message #297833]
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Sat, 04 February 2012 15:42
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| CptMoore |
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Messages:224
Registered:March 2009 |
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Biggest problem so far is the save/load game stuff.. i saved with my mercs unseen. I loaded and suddenly half of the enemy groups sees my mercs.
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Sergeant 1st Class
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| Re: Demo review of JA2:BiA[message #297842]
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Sat, 04 February 2012 17:36
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| mrgray |
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Messages:4
Registered:December 2011 |
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Finn
You can't seriously argue that it's not bugged because it's useless and there's no point in using it.
I say nothing about bugged guard mode or not, i just dont care. All my points are about melee.
Finn
Yeah, because shooting someone in the head with 100% accuracy when they're standing beside you...
Melee is not about standing beside each outher, you know?
About guarding a door - order a merc to shoot an enemy bofore he enter a door (give him like 5 or more order to shoot), even if the enemy out of merc LoS. Merc will say few times something about "Cant do this bla bla" and when enemy appears in a door will shoot him. Its my tip to solve a problem, its not bug, just crude game mechanics. Merc must spend some time before shoot (it shown near hit chance), thats why guard didnt work here - spot, shoot time, shot, but if u use my way for this - shoot time already done, if you lucky of course. Anyway it must be patched (like no shoottime in guard mode).
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Civilian
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| Re: Demo review of JA2:BiA[message #297853]
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Sat, 04 February 2012 21:53
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| Finn |
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Messages:85
Registered:October 2008
Location: Sweden |
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mrgrayFinn
You can't seriously argue that it's not bugged because it's useless and there's no point in using it.
I say nothing about bugged guard mode or not, i just dont care. All my points are about melee.
Finn
Yeah, because shooting someone in the head with 100% accuracy when they're standing beside you...
Melee is not about standing beside each outher, you know?
About guarding a door - order a merc to shoot an enemy bofore he enter a door (give him like 5 or more order to shoot), even if the enemy out of merc LoS. Merc will say few times something about "Cant do this bla bla" and when enemy appears in a door will shoot him. Its my tip to solve a problem, its not bug, just crude game mechanics. Merc must spend some time before shoot (it shown near hit chance), thats why guard didnt work here - spot, shoot time, shot, but if u use my way for this - shoot time already done, if you lucky of course. Anyway it must be patched (like no shoottime in guard mode).
Well no offense but you clearly don't get my point so there's really no point in continuing this discussion.
[Updated on: Sat, 04 February 2012 21:54] by Moderator Report message to a moderator
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Corporal 1st Class
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| Re: Demo review of JA2:BiA[message #297886]
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Sun, 05 February 2012 11:41
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| Fozzie |
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Messages:183
Registered:April 2010
Location: Germany |
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mrgrayFozzie So when I actually tried using it, I spent more time deleting misplaced orders than actually "planning".
Its all about lack of experiense in a game, not a game fault.
That's actually not how I meant it. What I was trying to say is that the controls are really imprecise. It's nigh impossible to "choose" a merc on the actual game screen. OK, you just stick to targetting them via the portraits, but it's just an example of how flawed the controls are. And a situation where you can't circumvent that issue is when you want your merc to stay put but face another direction. Most of the time you end up deleting unwanted movement orders over and over until you hit the right spot where to hold down the right mouse button. Cause a change of the cursor arrow doesn't guarantee that you got it right. You can also nearly spend minutes trying to order head shots when several enemies are around, cause there sometimes seems to be like a 2x2 pixels area to place the cursor for the game to correctly recognize the body part you want to aim at.
Or you ordered all of them to advance, but between the points of origin and destination, there's a rather narrow spot like a door, or a walkway, or a piece of furniture next to a wall, or a couple of trees, and you can watch them all share a nice Marx Brothers moment when they all get stuck there. Pathfinding of Command & Conquer harvesters was better...
And I know, pathfinding in JA2 wasn't that brilliant, either - but that should be the main point of a re-something (-make, -imagining, -boot, pick one), to IMPROVE on the stuff that was flawed in the original. But instead, they just removed most of the features without putting in anything new instead.
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Staff Sergeant
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| Re: Demo review of JA2:BiA[message #297967]
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Mon, 06 February 2012 13:08
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| 1Samildanach |
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Messages:56
Registered:February 2009
Location: Southern hemisphere |
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"The petrol tank was rusted out, so we upgraded it to a plastic bag, no extra charge! Not only that, we also replaced the threadbare seat covers with 100% pure hemp fabric, nice and coarse to help keep you in your seat! But wait, there's more! We've repainted that faded black paintwork with an all-new pastel green job, complete with bright red racing stripes!"
Toggle SpoilerI'm a GNU/Linux user who hasn't bothered trying the demo under Wine, so the above was based on comments from you guys and the devs.
[Updated on: Mon, 06 February 2012 13:08] by Moderator Report message to a moderator
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Corporal
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| Re: Demo review of JA2:BiA[message #298004]
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Tue, 07 February 2012 00:58
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| parachute |
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Messages:13
Registered:October 2007 |
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demo review: the plan and go system is inferior (UI-wise) to frozen synapse, you can't switch the order of commands for example.
Auto-pause didn't work.
Basically the whole p&g is a glorified 1995-RTS-shiftclick-command-queue with graphics. About as complex as Baldur's Gate combat.
So now we are playing "Baldurs Gate: Dragon Age: Jagged Alliance" and because we are so stupid we can see who has what kind of commands before we hit space to watch the adventure (place C4 H E R E, talk for quest H E R E, secret weapon trader H E R E etc.)
Somebody creating something remotely as ambitious as Jagged Alliance (huge story, huge voice acting, huge selection of strategies, intelligent gameplay)
[Updated on: Tue, 07 February 2012 01:02] by Moderator Report message to a moderator
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Private
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| Re: Demo review of JA2:BiA[message #298058]
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Tue, 07 February 2012 15:18
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| Narva |
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Messages:6
Registered:April 2009 |
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Downloaded the demo and gave it whirl few minutes ago.
My first impression - whats wrong the camera? I cannot tilt it so I can see further than 5-6 meters in front of my merc. I can zoom out to see more of the surrounding area but not enough (and this is not an elegant solution). Generally came controls feel clunky.
Second thing I noticed - Sometimes the weapon carries the right name sometimes it doesn't. This is immersion breaker for me.
One more thing : a grenade is thrown - and before the merc has started throwing animation - the guys run away from the impact point. That is a serious bug in my book. I could have understood if they run away when they see it coming (in air) or when it has landed but this is ridiculous.
I haven't played much past tutorial and few minutes of first mission so it is way too early to tell but I feel I will not be buying this one.
It doesn't give me that feeling of excitement I have when I start a good game and my instincts are rarely wrong about these things.
[Updated on: Tue, 07 February 2012 18:41] by Moderator Report message to a moderator
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Private
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| Re: Demo review of JA2:BiA (My pennies on the demo)[message #298109]
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Wed, 08 February 2012 09:31
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| Fozzie |
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Messages:183
Registered:April 2010
Location: Germany |
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Yes, it is also actually kind of unfair from people defending BiA to turn to the argument "the original was flawed on release, itself".
Of course, it was. But as I already posted some way above, removing those flaws and tapping out the full potential of features formerly not fully developed should be, what a remake is all about in the first place.
It's also about the sense of improvement. When JA1 was around, I really liked it. Then the sequel came, improving on about every single aspect - and I loved it. Then I stumbled upon the 1.13 mod, that did it again: improved on everything and feels more like a remake than BiA. This time, there is no improvement, at least not how I see it.
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Staff Sergeant
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