Angola 86 is out in early access on Steam for 9.99:
The same developer did Vietnam 65 and Afghanistan 11, both of which I enjoyed. I will take the plunge.
Here is the trailer:
I will report back after I have some game time with it.
Oh wow. That flew under my radar. Tom is gonna be happy (I hope)
I think it was four or five years ago that Tom and Bruce did a podcast with the developer who talked about this game, I believe.
Heh, some of these modern wars definitely get into gray areas in terms of content and context. The war in Angola certainly has enough connections to colonialism, apartheid-era South Africa, and violent versions of Communism to keep a legion of ideologues busy!
Yeah, I like these games and kinda wish the developers would make a sci-fi or non-historic game, so I can enjoy myself without having to suppress the history part of my brain. I don’t particularly want to play as apartheid South Africa.
I guess this is more of a contextual, possibly cultural difference but when I see “Angola” I think to myself, who in the world made a game about a maximum-security prison and why would you want to?
I at first thought it was an adaptation of the Ragnar Brothers board game until I saw ’86 in the title. Angola’s had a rough go of it.
I would be more excited if Afghanistan 11 hadn’t suffered such an ignoble fate after its release. It got piled up with some bullshit DLC that added a bunch of undocumented and poorly tested features, and wrassling with whatever the hell was going on basically killed the game for me. So I’m not confident the designer – I suspect it’s still a one-man effort? – is on the right trajectory for a next game. And I’m certainly not interested if it’s early access, although the Steam page implies it’s all but complete and just needs “three to six months” of playtesting. Which I’ll believe in “three to six months”.
All that said, I revisited Vietnam '65 earlier this year and damn does that design hold up! Even the wonky interface stuff falls away after you mess with it a bit. Such a wonderful and wonderfully thoughtful design, and I’m certainly excited to see how he applies it to Angola. So I’ll be eager to read any impressions here and then someone be sure to bump the thread for me when this goes to 1.0. :)
Tutorials:
Gah, those tutorial videos! So I couldn’t resist downloading Angola 86, but then I saw the designer posted this to the Steam forum by way of a disclaimer about it being in early access:
So it seems to be a bit more early access than the Steam page implied. I think I’ll just go back to waiting for “three to six months”. Someone else get in there!
Hi guys, would like to clear up two important issues with Angola’86:
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This is the first title I have developed with my own team, done primarily to avoid the A’11 situation which was an outsource. I decided to take total control over the production as this is my passion.
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The tutorial videos were not designed for end user consumption, but rather were a very rough production to assist the beta testers as no manual was available at the time. These videos are all outdated as they were done a while ago.
We will be doing a proper video series in the coming weeks.
The game is very much in a playable state, the UI is due an art refresh, not a functional fix.
As always, greatly appreciate any feedback on the game, hope to learn from the early access.
It’s also fully documented! I hadn’t remembered that Vietnam 65 and Afghanistan 11 both had internal documentation that fully explained everything (Afghanistan 11 DLC excepted), and when I asked on Steam about a manual for Angola 86, I was reminded that it’s inside the game, like so:
It’s under a button labeled “tutorials”. Note that’s basically a table of contents on the left side of the screen. Each of those categories has several subcategories. For instance, the button for USER INTERFACE isn’t just a one-sheet of commands, but it’s a whole other section with a whole list of entries:
So even if you get this and wait for it to go to 1.0 before playing, you’ll have plenty of documentation to read while you wait.
That’s my feeling, as much as I liked the developer’s first 2 efforts.
Why not? You are gonna make them lose all the time, from my experience with Vietnam 65!
South Africa was the Western proxy to the local Cold War, and it was our Western countries that maintained its freak rule in power. If the release of the game can remind or even teach some about that part of history on top of being a good mental gaming exercise, it is all positive to me.
I get that. As a historical wargamer, I have long since gotten over playing as the „bad” sides in history (for much of the reason described by @Left_Empty) but I can see how it could be turn-off for ppl.
I think the 1961-74 part of the conflict (The War of Independence) is even more interesting! Carnation Revolution! But impossible to game.
Well. WW2 was a doozy in that regard as well, with a large chunk of genocide and white supremacism - and many of those games can be played from either side.
Not sure I see the difference tbh.
Time has a lot to do with it. Many of us were alive, as teens or adults, during the Angola war, and many more of us remember when South Africa was always in the news for its apartheid policies. WWII, though vastly large in scale, in all sorts of ways, is more or less ancient history by now for most people.
In a game on Kursk or Stalingrad or the Bulge, for instance, it’s a bit easier to see a wide gap between national policies and battlefield events. Huge, mass-conscription armies and war spanning many years creates a situation where individual parts of the fighting can be cut out and viewed in isolation.
Still, you are not wrong. As I’ve grown older I’ve become increasingly reluctant to play the Nazis in WWII games, particularly the more strategic ones where the impact of the Third Reich’s broader ideology is a bit more pronounced.
I also am not saying anything specific about this particular game, as I have not played it. You can certainly make a game that explores counter-insurgency warfare from both sides, without making it an endorsement of neocolonialism or terrorism, etc.
I only play WWII games that will allow the player to play as the Allies.
It’s interesting, because time has definitely not much to do with it for my emotional taking of, not of WW2 and WWI games’ subject matter itself, but of how that subject matter is dealt with. I have many issues with the “weapon and armymen” porn approach to the depiction of either conflict - which is vastly more commonly found in FPS than strategy games, of course. But, as ironic as I like to think I am, I take issues too with light tone in games about those wars. Wether you think Heroes of Normandy is a good or bad game (I think it’s trash, simply put), I know I couldn’t look at it with any good will simply because of its, insufferable to me, tone. And the fact it doesn’t depict anything and doesn’t have any point of view and… Okay nevermind, I triggered something inside me.
I actually avoided WW2 themed games, them being board or video, for the longest time, until I reached those forums about 17 years ago and was taught that the mechanics themselves could be holding a political discourse.