Jagged Alliance 3 Review (vidmich)
I'm very disappointed with this game. After so many talks about JA2 and that devs will honor it's gameplay, they created much worse game than JA2.
The list of issues (in no particular order):
- zoom SHOULD have angle change. I want to see better what is there, I zoom in and I can't see shit cause angle is the same and the same objects blocks my sight. Zoom without angle change was like 10-15 years ago. to have zoom like this means that devs are not gamers, they have no idea what gamers actually want and treat as MVP for the game
- enable to PAUSE tactical game when not in combat. wtf? the enemies came to my sector, they walking on the road and I have to give order like this is some kind of RTS? make it possible to pause any time I like to give more precise orders. In JA2 pause happen when my mercs see the enemy, not when enemy sees me and start combat.
- Tactical maps are SMALL. Really small. They loads fast and I didn't notice any graphics issues (at least on my computer) so I don't see any technical reason why not make maps bigger, like 2-4 times bigger. What the point in bringing machine gun to the village and been able to control it if it is placed like 5 steps from the map border? It is laziness, nothing else.
- Overwatch is not the same as JA2 interruptions. It is stupid when during your turn you can shoot like 1 burst or 2 snap single shots while in overwatch you do 3 bursts. In most cases it is better to put your merc to overwatch instead of trying to shot the enemy. It is unrealistic, it is boring and it is worse than what we had in JA2.
- Inability to rotate merc in place, i.e. rotate to look in particular direction. why? it is in my spinal cord that merc should look in the direction of enemy to spend less AP next turn to shoot him. Why this is not implemented here?? Also JA2 had shift movement keeping the look direction, absent here.
- loot stupid as before. enemy could be with powerful gun but after killing him no gun, not even weapon parts. I understand that similar thing was in JA2, BUT we had stealing after stun or just dropping weapon to the ground after stun. Nothing like this here. Again devs should actually play JA2 to know this. btw I didn't notice so far enemies which were dying unconsciously or stun.
- militia is stupid. I had like hand guns and several msqs, I trained militia, enemy attacked my zone, I see like 8 militia with automatic rifles. they f.ing more powerful than my squad. I'm not sure what armor they got but I wouldn't be surprised if they had all 3 armor items on them. I understand that it would be annoying to have system like JA:BiA but in JA2 we had several levels on militia. also overall game progress might give good idea what weapons should be assigned to militia.
- weapon abilities is STUPID. like if you have SMG you can do run and shoot, or Mobile shot for hand guns ( I think). this means that sometimes enemy will f.ing run through half of the map and shot your merc. not because he had a lot of AP, but because of weapon ability. Which means that whatever clever plan you had, however carefully you place your mercs they WILL be shot. Especially when you kill almost all the enemies you have to rush the rest of enemies instead of calmly kill them cause it will be less chance that your mercs will be shoot. The less enemies left the more chance that some of them do this stupid weapon ability and shot somebody. This is stupid!
- mercs talks should have setting to disable it. I'm ok hearing them in dialogs with npcs cause it is rare. but hearing same 5 phrases per merc all the f.ing time is just annoying.
Anyway I'm to lazy and annoyed to remember all the issues I seen. Some stuff done OK, some maybe even good. but the rest of the game is simplified, dumb down version of JA2 which is bad.
I haven't played much of this game. I writing this before even leaving first island. I probably will power through the rest of the game to see the plot cursing devs along the way. But seeing issues everywhere I don't believe that they successfully implement more deeper things which we had in JA2. I just don't believe it.
The best thing devs could done is just release remaster of JA2 with better support of modern OSes, maybe more modes of game etc. how they can't understand this I just don't know.