Jagged Alliance: Back in Action Preview
-
Category: News ArchiveHits: 1322
The pace is quicker but the tactics haven't changed that much. One thing that changed my play style is that either the random number gods were playing a consistent game of silly beggars or bullets hurt a lot more. My team and the bad guys alike were dropping like flies. Maybe that's because it's harder to keep track of bleeding when it's a constant flow rather than a sort of tick-tock effect. Whatever the case, the fact that combat feels more immediate and lethal isn't a bad thing. It may be a necessary brake, preventing a squad from strolling forward, all guns blazing, killing enemies as soon as they come into sight.
Except they don't come into sight at all. They're always in sight. You're God now, you see, or at least the omniscient part of Him. As soon as your squad enters an area, every enemy is marked on the map. You don't just see their starting locations either, but all the moves they make. That completely removes the possibility of those daredevil raids that lead to a severely outnumbered squad blundering its way into trouble and back out again. Fog of war, or skirmish perhaps, was essential to creating tension and making exploration dangerous and its removal is absolutely baffling.
Being able to see the enemies also shines the world's biggest torch on the game's biggest problem and that is the enemy AI. I suspect the goons in almost every game would look pretty silly if their actions were exposed at all times. They'd either stand around waiting to be activated when a player came within an assigned radius, or wander at random. In JA:BIA it's a combination of the two but with added sensory deprivation.
