Pod
1881
I love JA2. It’s one of my favourite games. I’ve yet to back this yet, as I’m not confident they’ll do a good job. I’ve not played it yet, but it’s F2P so I’ll try their previous game, Frontline Tactics, tonight, but I watched a video on youtube and it looks very stale. Unless they explicitly say “here’s a big list of reasons why Back In Action sucked and how we’re going to avoid that”, then in my mind I think they’ll just fall into the same traps. (Well, they’ve already state it’s turn and tile based, so that’s that massive error avoided).
Finally, they keep saying how they’d like to tell the story of A.I.M. during the cold wa- ZZZZZzzzzzz. Sorry, I dozed off. Telling stories is the first nail in the coffin of a game who intends to be highly dynamic and emergent one. Vastly different situations and scenario paths with every play through? First thing to be thrown right out the window when a story comes a knockin’.
habibi
1882
Yeah, I love JA but I didn’t back this up either. I think they had bad timing really and their emphasis on story sounds kinda like a me-too following Torment’s story focus. As I was reading the previous post I thought of Silent Storm. Cheesy story but I love the destructible terrain. Now I’d like to see someone Kickstarter that franchise!
Huh, I surprisingly got my first Kickstarted game that, rather than being an alpha or beta, appears to be the final game, and yet, it was the least expensive project I kicked. Crayon Chronicles, a cute little roguelike thing. Weird, the campaign that cost me the least was the fastest to complete, but the one I put the most money to, Star Citizen won’t be out at least for another year.
Just thought that was odd, that was.
Dejin
1884
Let us know how Frontline Tactics is. I kicked in at the lowest level which got me a copy of the game. I would have kicked in a lot more if this had been the original team. But instead it’s largely an unknown company. Plus as someone else pointed out, there have been several JA games put out over the past few years and none of them appears to have captured the magic of the original two.
I think they should have waited until their Space Hulk implementation came out and then tried to run the Kickstarter. If Space Hulk turned out well, I certainly would have been happy to make a larger contribution.
Pod
1885
It’s really dull. It’s just sacks of HP standing around in the open shooting at each other. You can hide behind objects, but it doesn’t help that much as the AI just likes to run right up to you. Also, it’s not clear how diagonals effect the cardinal-direction-orientated cover system. (And there’s no corner peer/stepout like in XCOM, either). Something I haven’t seen before is a shuffle round system, where a list of “who is next” is built entirely at random and publicised. That’s interesting, but it’s annoying as I’ve had the same person can go 3 times in a row. There’s no way to switch soldiers to see what your other team members can see, to help you plan who does what. You just have to kind of remember if that guy could reach the next cover spot or not, etc, before planning the current guy. There’s also a ‘sneak’ cammo system which basically doesn’t work. (Not only is there no UI indication of how cloaked you are, so you end up counting squares, but the AI just mills about at random until it encounters you by chance).
ps: wasd rotates, arrow keys scroll. How odd. LMB moves unit but it also moves the camera. So often clicks don’t register as move commands but move-camera-by-1-px commands.
Overall: A low budget game that appears to be geared towards selling you IAP, but has no entertaining ‘hook’ to draw you in.
I hope their JA is nothing like it, simply.
Dejin
1886
Ugh. Thanks for the mini-review Pod.
This is, without a doubt, the most awesome sentence describing a game ever penned. Thanks, now I’m never again going to be able to think about that title without visualizing sacks of HP.
Is it just me, or is it super weird to offer a conference call / skype with the developers as one of the kickstarter rewards? It’s like: “pay $1000 for an awkward conversation!” It seems weirdly…stripper-y?
Also, it’s extra weird because, like, they’re just normal people. If you happened to sit next to them in a bar or at a conference or something, you could have that same conversation for free. Hell, most developers I know would probably respond to an unsolicited e-mail if it was sincere and well written.
Might be worth it if the developer was trippy, or original, or a raving psycho, or something. Like a conference call to Jeff Minter where you go into detail about ruminates.
No, it isn’t just you. It’s totally and utterly weird. I’d feel stupid and also evil doing that as a developer. You talk to your biggest fans, not your wealthiest ones, surely?
Just to inject a libertarian perspective, I find this goal utterly and totally normal. In fact, I find it utterly and totally weird that someone would not think the person that paid the most is the biggest fan. Money indicates all virtue.
Tony_M
1892
But would it be stripper-y?
9 hours left, $3.5k short.
Looks like it’s going to be a photo-finish for this one!
I backed this one, because I love JA2, didn’t much care for the recent sequels, and am hopeful that the original magic can be recaptured and am willing to gamble $25 on it.
Made it with 7 hours left!
Episode 1 of Tiny Barbarian is out!
And the first video from Asylumis on youtube!
Glad to see some of my kickstarted games becoming reality now.
I present Spintires, an off-road driving simulator with an awesome 8-wheel drive truck and some quite cool looking terrain deformation physics!
rowe33
1899
Dungeon Dice is down to its last 100 minutes. As a dice lover, I’m backing this one - looks like it could be a fun game for up to 5 with the booster pack. About 9k from a stretch goal that adds 3 more dice and 11k from a free potion pack (7 free dice.)
After playing ETS2, this looks pretty damned appealing.
