I've overcome my distaste of this game to a certain degree and I've been playing it a lot lately. I must admit a large part of it was a kneejerk reaction to their treatment of Ice, who I made the mistake of hiring for my first squad. I was offended, and rightly so. Come on, I've been playing with him since JA1! Thankfully, other known characters have been disappointing to a lesser degree.
I'm now in my second campaign in the Mission Impossible difficulty. The first came to an abrupt end as I found myself in a rather impossible financial situation. I'm not a bank, so no bailouts for me. Good of the devs for staying true to the old school game design, though. My second campaign is going much better.
I'm playing with the Key's Mercs mod, which adds a lot of cool characters, including old favorites like Razor, Hamoun and Maddog, who are of course 10x funnier than anything originally in this game. There are also some I don't remember, like Diego "Coach" Mendoza, a motivational speaker with 95 Leadership. He's also much funnier than the vanilla characters, despite his voice being obviously AI generated, which isn't entirely negative as it adds to his uncaniness. The mod does make the game slightly easier, though. For example, Razor is a killing machine, since melee is so strong now, and you can get him for peanuts. Flo is also dirt cheap, but still an excellent utility character due to her high Wisdom. All in all, I like having more choice in Recruit level mercs for this difficulty, as money is so tight.
I've also installed a mod that adds the JA2 voice to the respective characters, although it doesn't work that well for me. I still haven't heard any of Buns' iconic lines, which was all I wanted. The music mods also work inconsistently for me. I find the original selection too generic, and resent the addition of "wholesome African music", which doesn't fit the tone of JA, imo. Then again, that is part of the new game's "modern sensibility", its reversion to the mean in other words.
The gameplay is quality, even if it differs considerably from the classic JA formula. Some observations:
- Melee was barely there in JA2, now melee is king. Couple it with Commandos style stealth, and you have a super effective combination. I'd almost say it's broken, but then again, the game also throws Brutes at you, and you need your own melee guys to defend against them effectively. Like in Commandos, they work much better as a team.
- Perks are a real departure from the semi-simulationist design of before. There's a lot of fantasy stuff in the game now.
- High Wisdom is like a super power. I trained my IMP, Buns and MD to 90 Leadership in basically one day(with Coach Mendoza as a trainer). It also took one day for MD, Barry and Livewire to get their Marksmanship in the high 80s. Kind of broken, yes.
- The new interrupt system is a double edged sword. It's more predictable, but for that reason lets you play more offensively. I think one of the flaws of classic JA combat is that it privileged camping too much. Normally you'd want your mercs to have superior range and hide behind layers of defense, while here you can make more use of fancy squad tactics.
All the nitpicking aside, I'm having fun with the game and it's already made me lose a couple of nights sleep, just like good old JA.
. A good alternative would be plot-related - your team will be transported via regular plane so that they can smuggle just 3 pistols and a knife to the combat zone.
