Some things in this post may have mentioned before, but I want them off my chest.

I am a long time JA veteran. Played JA2 to death and tried every JA version, be it official or rip-off, around. For instance; Hired Guns: The Jagged Edge was...well...very bad although I actually enjoyed Jagged Alliance:Back In Action. But the original Jagged Alliance 2 was never reached. I was so glad that I saw that a company made a true reboot of the game, even backed by The Bear's Pit guys, who made the JA2 1.13 version, and that is the way JA2 is to be played.

So I bought Flashback. And to be fair; It was quite the disappointment. It looks rushed and honestly very low-budget. Here are a few pros and cons I experienced, hopefully they will be adressed.

Pros

- Graphics look nice; The environments are well drawn, animations of the mercs and weather effects are good

- The mercenary pictures are very good; Better than JA2, ten million times better than JA:BiA

- IMP Creation; True to the original

Cons

- What is with the speech of the mercs? I recruited a girl in one of the first sectors and she sounds like a CPU. A CPU from the 80-ies that is. I understand speech is expensive but adding a computerised voice to a merc? Really? REALLY?? As you have the license; Why not re-use the speech set from JA2? All the voices of the mercs are pre-recorded in the original game, not difficult to transfer them to this game I would think. Those original speeches added a lot to the immersion, the one-liners and voices easily recognisable by JA2 veterans. These new speeches are very, very, very bad....

- The "shop" in the first town. Where is the UI? You cannot see how much money you have; what you buy nor transfer it directly to a merc. You just have to click blindly to buy things until you have no money left. This is so bad, I cannot believe it got through Beta. Why not an UI like the original game had? (hell, even BiA had a better UI regarding shops).

- The main screen. Maybe something is added later in game on the main screen, but now it is just a (too) small map, on a too big screen. It looks like money has been saved by making the main screen look like as minimilistic as possible. Why not a same UI as the original? A big map, nice list of mercs where you can look up their stats with a single click. Why change the UI? Why??? And where is my laptop? Where is the nice e-mail and web system? Cut for funding?

- Looting; Maybe there is a button I missed but where is the option to loot from the main screen? Do I really have to loot from the tactical screen? In the original you could click on a sector and see all the items in that sector, for easy item management. Now you have to walk through the tactical screen to manually pick everything up. Even pressing  "i" when on top of loot.

- Why can't I search in cabinets, boxes, dressers, etc.? There is no exploration in maps.

- What is with the enemy combatants on the world map? I can no longer see how strong the roaming armies are. On a side note; What is with the simple militia interface when a sector is under attack? Only numbers are shown, nothing like the defending screens of the original. It also seems that the militia in Flashback are more useless than in the original.

These are the first few things I have of my 4ish hours of gamplay. Somehow it doesn't feel like JA2, it feels like the (very bad) JA:Online, only for single-player.

The immersion is gone from the original but can be regained by a few things; The UI and, maybe the most important thing, the speeches of the original characters. Full Control did a great job on the character portraits, so why not the speeches? I am a bit disappointed that the guys from The Bear's Pit actually approved of the game in its current state.

Hopefully they will address these issues soon. I think I am going to shelf this game for now, revisit it some time later and see if it is improved. It is a shame really; I really looked forward to a true JA2 remake. I was too late to back the KS, as I discovered KS only a little while ago, but bought the game on release confident that they actually released a full game. I am very disappointed. 

Kind regards,

Low

- that girl might've been a merc reward from KS with a user submited voice. I know, FC should've rejected the audio files, but in the end is the user who made the files if thats the case and he payed thousands to have that merc in game.

- shop is at the top of the list of things to change in the next post-release patch

- UI is fugly. Want to chip in on my Kingping bounty fund for the man who designed it?

- Looting  - no sector inventory, replaced by infinite "mule" aka squad inventory; dubious design decision, criticised, still a design decision (think it related to the above issue)

- You can actually loot cabinets, boxes, etc (you get a hand cursor) but they lack open/closed state and the specific open/close sound JA2 had so most people assume looting containers doesn't work

- Militia... something I would've personally just left out rather than adding in current "auto-resolve" state.

- Immersion is gone because:

a) the dialogue interface sucks (again, how much will contribute to UI bounty fund?)

b) there's a sublime and total lack of JA2 like pre-scripted cutscenes (Elliot, you idiot! Slap-slap!... you know... that kind)

c) game has no intro/outro movies, just static pictures.

Hopefully in time all the above will be fixed.

I agree that the graphics look really good. The squad inventory is a great idea too. Some of the controls are better (more modern) now. There is definitely some of 80s/JA humour there, which is a good thing.

BUT...

- Where are all the shortcuts gone? b for burst, alt to walk backwards, z for sneaking. There are no explanations for the controls anywhere. I really don't know if a feature is missing or if I just haven't found out about it.

- yet it seems that lots of stuff like sneaking, walking backwards, jumping over fences, rooftops etc is missing. I can do without the rooftops if I have to but I really don't understand why some of that other stuff is missing.

- pathfinding is not very good. If one merc is walking through a door the second merc won't wait until it's his turn to walk through but race off across the entire maps right into enemy hands.

- no intro. Nobody expects a Wing Commander epic with Hollywood actors but nothing at all? That doesn't set the story. Even some a graphics slide show in form of polaroid pictures (80s!) plus some text would do.

- the 90 degrees camera jump is not so great as it often doesn't give you better view at all. If we could at least press "t" to remove the treetops...

- lockers, crates, cabinets - there is no animation, I don't know whether I have already opened them or not. come to think of it, I haven't run across any doors that I can open or close yet.

- not sure if I like the simplified AP system. I can't save up APs and when I'm hit I don't lose APs. wouldn't matter in a another game, but this is a JA core system, just like...

- weapons attachments! I've never been much of a tinkerer in terms of DIY stuff (never really needed it) but attaching scopes, tripods, grenade launchers etc is an essential part of JA

- the absolute worst non-function though is that we have to click on every single merc every single turn to set him to interrupt. WHY?! completely annoying, useless feature. What's wrong with the old ways? We're in a combat zone, I expect my mercs to trigger interrupts on their own. This is the biggest game-breaking thing for me so far.

If you tell her you will contact her later you get to see her bio. Apparently her throat was crushed and she had a synthetic voice synthesizer implanted. Well um ok... it's kind of pathetic. It's also bugged because it says she's hirable for $1,600 a day but when you get her in the merc databank she's way cheaper than that.

Thanks for the reply. I hope you (and your fellow modders) can fix the game should FC doesn't have the manpower/funding for it. Like I said, I will shel;f this game for the time being. Time to reinstall JA2 again, with 1.13 ofcourse :)

Kind regards,

Low

Yeah, all mercs you meet in person have wrong numbers in their dialogs. Their price was changed lately and they didn't update the dialogs.

Every Point You both mentioned I tried to convince FC to do better. - Interruption system is broken, old ja2 works better. It is like in when no one listened with BIA turn-based mode;now it's the interrupt.

Reinventing the wheel is always bad, when you do a successor.

- Ui should be as in ja2 with small changes. No one listened. - Pathfinding is annoying when doors are involved

- To be fair, some aspects will be fixed soon like the shop and attachments.

- As Shanga explained the AI is not where it should be now. You have to reuse all of the voice assets from ja2. Some reviwers claimed that the combats a bit repetitive.

That is true to some fact : AI probs, no death animations wth special kills, no comments about befriended mercs, no rooftops, no explosions like Gas tanks, no heavy weapons, no distractuable env. / buildings to find another way into sector and combat. Sectors are a bit too small. At the beginning they even wanted to cut ja crosshair! Without a voiced storyline with voiced NPCs + in game graphic cut scenes you lose a lot of immersion.

But the actual engine would seem doing well with in game cut scenes. I would like to see a test. Role-playing a Elliot Deidrana scene. I invested a lot of time giving feedback all over the place. A lot of it was used. But the important stuff what's not agreed on or simply not in the budget. When you ask me who is right the developer or the customer I say no one.  

Just do it like in the original, JA2 because that game proved (selled good, praised by press and community) which concepts work and how they interact! Raise your voices so that FC can listen and change the entire interrupt systemto what it was before.

Also fix the UI to be more like ja2 is featured in the ui threads. There are a lot small pieces in combat left out like spinning enemy after hit hard by bullet. The look and the impact and fire rate of a fn-fal bursts not as in ja2.  

Still some polishing required. Reuse more solid sound files for example hit and death, but from ja2 not from bia!! The died 'arggh' sound now is so untrue to the comic style view of the world. FC got all the feedback already in forums here and elsewhere .

You could have done another helicopter drop off in the sector and use some sound files, a ladder and new animations for the start it's so important to drive in the story in the first minute.

All so new mercs should not appear directly off the hiring screen. 12to 24h delay  Should be indicated in the strategic map but due to you ui limitations we can't see such information.

Believe me this feedback was given already. Or a sky diving cut scene so the first merc can land. But why do we start with one Merc only?

No one asked this before. It does make no sense if you want to win a revolution!

Archo please use enter or sth. Your text is not readable like this.

Sorry, edit it later. The forum here does not support iPhone. The input field wired can only use "source".

EDIT: done

I think the Agent is a left-over from the original scenario (which was great), where you would infiltrate San Hermanos and establish a secret base of operations, build it up and only then start recruiting mercs.

There was supposed to be no recruitment rolodex so soon in the game. All initial mercs should've been quested (Buns Sondergard and Vicky are good examples). The mercs you find should've given you their phone number if you couldn't pay them (nice touch) and maybe the phone number of a friend.

This is how you would've ended up with a full Rolodex.

What came out was something that doesn't even look like a rolodex. Either make it like this (DataRover, release in 1988):

Or if you want to be purist, make a screen like this, with monochrome PC, old type phone and a rolodex.

Yeah since I couldn't get involved in the whole development process despite having had paid for alpha access I was a bit disappointed that the original story was changed to a simple "kill the drug kingpin". But it's good enough for me and very 80s - anyone remember The Delta Force with Chuck Norris? :D

I suppose the change in story was done to appease the Russian buyers who were complaining bitterly during the Kickstarter project?

I think the foundations are there to make this a great game, but I'm afraid it will need some heavy modding...

The main story wasn't really changed... FC built some sketches and props... added some meat to them... then fixed some bugs... and added some more ideas and props... then fixed a lot more bugs... then the money was finished.

But they have the ideas. And they have the desire to make the game perfect. They just need either to win a jackpot at the lottery or for JAF to do well in sales.

Yeah I think the guys at FC have their hearts on their sleeves and they try to do their best - I hope a windfall goes their way! But what we have now seems to disappoint everyone round - even though it isn't as bad as some people pretend it is :/