Knights of the Cardboard Castle

This is a remake of Jagged Alliance 2, a game that I spent countless hours on, especially under the Wildfire mod. Similarly after only a short time with the main game, I switched over to the highly regarded Combat Evolved mod and all of my impressions of this game are gleaned this way.

• This is a rather faithful remake with the most obvious difference being that everything is now in 3D. This means much better graphics. I recall that in the old game it was hard to visually distinguish between your mercenaries. That is certainly no longer the case. Similarly environments are prettified and quite detailed. Nothing to shout about by the standards of modern games of course, but light years ahead of the original. And of course you can rotate the view and zoom in and out to your heart’s content. One of my favourite things about moving to full 3D is that all of your equipment is accurately reflected on the character models. The absurdly long sniper rifles some of them tote around look very impressive!

• Gameplay-wise the big change is that it’s no longer turn-based. Now it’s pausable real-time, but with the ability to queue up actions for each merc. You also get a nice way to synchronize actions so that all mercs open fire at the exact same time for example. I was initially very sceptical about this change but it turned out to work very well and I couldn’t imagine putting up with the tediousness of playing it the old way any more. It makes everything flow much more smoothly and removes the awkward transition from non-combat mode to combat mode.

• Unfortunately that’s pretty much it as far as good things to say about it goes. It all goes downhill from here. To begin with the move to 3D seems to come with some subtle bugs. When deciding whether or not to shoot at an enemy, a tooltip tells you the odds of a successful shot, ranging from Impossible to Certain. Unfortunately as you’ll soon learn this information is wrong since shots that are said to be Certain will frequently miss if your mercenary standing next to a solid object, such as a wall or a window. Apparently the game models the actual flight of each projectile and bullets that intersect with another object before it reaches the target are misses but the tooltip doesn’t seem to take this account. This make cover almost impossible to use. You’ll find that the best position for your mercenaries is counter-intuitively right out in the open where they’ll have unimpeded fields of fire.
• What’s worse is that the AI-controlled enemies don’t seem to suffer from this problem. They are perfectly capable of shooting at your mercenaries from all sorts of unlikely places, sometimes shooting right through cars or even roofs at impossible angles! They will also lie prone on the ground behind cars to shoot at your mercs’ legs, which I guess is realistic but highly undignified. Needless to say this makes the game very frustrating because it’s no fun at all to be instantly killed from an angle that you think about be an impossible shot.
• In the original game with its tile-based graphics, the environment was completely destructible. You could place explosives anywhere and grenades and rocket launches would tear chunks out of walls, take down fences, anything you want. It made the environment feel much more interesting and opened up the tactical choices available. That’s all gone now. Explosives can now only be set on weak walls that are designated as such. No other pieces of the environment can be destroyed. That makes explosives pretty much useless. The scenery looks pretty sure, but it also feels more sterile now.

• Many features from the original game are just gone. There is no crafting system now. You can attach mods to weapons (only 1 mod slot per weapon!) and repair weapons and that’s it. You can’t even repair armor items now and armor can’t be modified (no more ceramic inserts). Healing is simplified so that it works like standard videogame hit points. In the original game, injuries were realistic in that medical attention is needed to prevent injured soldiers from dying but actual recovery takes time. You can’t even leave mercenaries in towns to train militia. Instead you give weapons to grunts and pay cash to increase their skills, which is boring. You don’t get vehicles to zip around Arulco either. You leg it all the time. No ice-cream vans, no helicopters.
• In fact, the entire game lacks personality. There are none of the little touches that made the original game so memorable. The developers tried to add some in-game banter between some mercs but it’s pretty pathetic. There are no aliens, no elite guards armed with rocket rifles etc. Even the night environment is now much tamer that the original. I remember needing to throw break lights and relying on flashes of lightning to see at night. You don’t even get the funny little cutscenes that detail Deidranna’s reaction as you progressively conquer more of Arulco.

What we do have is a very by-the-book effort, with solid enough gameplay, but too little variation and personality to stave off boredom. It looks pretty yes, but the overall result is markedly inferior to the original game.