Knights of the Cardboard Castle

This post covers the game pre-Enemy Within. Yes, this means I intend to get the DLC and replay this eventually. Like everyone else the original version was one of my favourites during the glory years of Microprose, so I wouldn’t have missed this for the world. Some brief thoughts:

•  I really appreciated the graphics upgrade. I didn’t think it would matter much before I played this new version but it did. Everything looks so spiffy. I even like all of the nice animation details. The side view of the base looks great even if it is non-interactive and pure eye candy. I especially the design of the new Thin Man alien type, right down to their reptilian eyes and unnatural movements.

• I like the RPG-like upgrade tree for soldiers now. It makes tactical combat more interesting and allows for differentiation between soldiers. It also offers meaningful advancement for soldiers while intelligently avoiding the old problem of supersoldiers running around with ludicrously high TU and are consequently able to fire a ridiculous number of times per round.
• I was surprised by how much I liked the 3D tactical map. A lot of tactical games handle the transition to 3D badly. The new Jagged Alliance for example all but did away with destructible objects in the environment. You can’t quite level everything in sight like you could in the original game but you can knock out walls and destroy cover, so I’d call it good enough.

• The whole thing plays like an abbreviated, polished down to the essentials version of the original. Purists can legitimately gripe about how a lot of things have been watered down or left out, but I also remember how the tedious the original could get at times. For example, needing to manually manage ammunition was a pain and it never made sense that you needed to buy conventional weapons. That said, some complexity has indeed been lost. Base construction is now much too simple since you no longer need to worry about storage space and personnel quarters, and you only ever get one base. Producing items also seems something of a joke since you can apparently can build any number of things at the same time and small items can be made instantly.
• The loss I miss most of all are base defence missions. Apparently they’re gone because with only one base, the developers felt that they couldn’t risk having the player lose the game due to one lost battle. But without it an essential sense of risk is gone. There are now bomb disposal missions and escort missions to make up for it, but the loss is still keenly felt.
• There are some losses on the tactical map too. Missions go by faster now because maps seem smaller and enemies are much easier to find. While there are multiple vertical levels, there seem to be fewer of them in the original. You can still invent flying suits and fly around but you can never go very high. Most of all, there is now no notion of darkness, so gone are the times when you needed to bring flares to expose the enemy’s position.

• Oddly for such a high profile release from a respected publisher, there are a number of annoying bugs. If you try to switch from one soldier to another while the previously selected soldier still has an animation running, such as switching weapons, you go to a stuck state where no soldier is selectable and you give anyone any orders. Animations frequently have hitches, either they run on for longer than clearly intended or they play at odd moments, such as the sniper’s firing animation running after the shot has already been fired. On rare occasions, I’ve even had crashes to the desktop when an animation was running.
• Normal difficulty is too easy. I found Classic difficulty to be about right but I really dislike how the game artificially uses abduction missions to artificially inflate the panic level. As a result while the game on the tactical map plays differently but is fun, the game on the strategic layer doesn’t feel organic and real any longer. It doesn’t feel as if the aliens are proceeding with their plans and the player may intervene in them on a number of levels, from intercepting their ships to landing troops while they are performing ground missions to assaulting their bases. In fact, interceptions seem rather rare and you only ever get to do one base assault. Mystifying.

Overall I found this to be very good game that stands on its own independently of the original. The original still has more complexity because there’s a lot to be said about streamlining the game and eliminating the tedious moments, such as whack-a-mole alien hunting which I don’t think I could put up with nowadays. And of course better graphics is always nice to have.