Fan-Based Review

[5Cents]

@GODSPEED brought me to the idea, for a Fanbased-Review, as a sum of all players-thoughts and feelings.
Do your own Rating, after playing it, for a while.
Aspects like
-Artconcept/design/general feeling
-Gameplay
-Gamebalace
-Strategical and tactical Aspects
-Overall sum
-etc.
should be rated.
What do you think about the idea?

 

[5Cents]

So i made my own short game-review, to share my own thoughts and overall feelings about JA3.  

Description: + Well done, - Bad, +/- Draw
 
"Sounds & Vision"
+ Good music, not annoying even after time (not too intrusive, not too boring)
+ Impressive (cause real) weapon sounds.
+ Nice graphic representation with a lot of details (realistic looking nature, lot of nice plants, fishes in the water, animals, scelets, etcetc)
+ Sorrounding is distroyable.
- Very few short sequences.
 
Gameplay, gamedepth, balance
+ Lifelike athmosphere (overall leveldesign, sounds & music)
  + Laptop emails (storyline or just with funny content)
    + Interesting storyline, red hot topics, profound & controversial contents.
    + Enough adult content, not beeing a child-game
    + Character drawing (less cartoony than i thought, but not too much looking to wannabe real military lifelike mercs)
    + Felling there have been put a lot effort in the JA3 world design in general.
- AI seems like beeing stupid and scripted (on stratetic and tactical level)
 - Enemy group sizes are bit dissapointing
 - Overwatch system isnt very helpful and is tricked by the AI (cause overwatch-area its visible to AI)
 - Overwatch system felt unsatisfying. Interrupt-system was more fun to me.
+/- PERK system (im not sure if i like it or not)
+/- Weather and environmental factors. I read about that topic, they are in, yes they are visible, but about effects, well promised me more. Couldnt recognize extreme weather effected my merc, weapons or strategy, IMO effects were too low and not visible to me). Some Merc dialogues could have give a hint, weather effecting something or someone. It just didnt felt dramatically influenced anything, ime.
Weapons
    + No more weird "tons of guns", with every imaginable caliber and from all army-archives worldwide. I like it, less is sometimes better. Arsenal is almost perfectly adequate to country, setting and types of enemy.
    + Nice graphics, detailed optic (even mods are visible)
    + Nice sounds
    - No more draw costs, AP plus for first shot (less tactical deepness)
    - No more different penalty / auto penalty? values, for different wpns (not sure about that).
    - No more barrage with autoweapons on areas or enemysquads, just pointfire (less tactical deepness)
     +/- Instead of 1 mortar grenade 4 or 5 independent incomings (you will never know, what youre hitting exactly, even if your merc ist good enough). Is that to be solved by a special perk?
      - Unrealistic weapon values in general (AK 74 f.e. based on its stats is one of the most advanced, compared to other AR, or even the best ingame-AR)
    + official editor announced.
 
Gameplay
 + Traditional roundbased fun, yes.
 + Destroyable surrounding can be included to your strategy (like collapsing rooftops)
 + Lot of different sidequests.
- Merc inventory box (btw Ja2 had its own limitation here, weight overload but wasnt possible to use, because lmt slots) has annoying tactical inventory managment (f.e. full inventory, its not possible change between second rifle on merc, to smaller items; without drop down items)
 - Catastrophic Inventory-managment-system (allready mentioned before, by testers & gamers)
    (+ maybe some patches will follow, i heard some rumors)  
 - Scripted events (Flag-Hill event when searching for Santiago having an bossfight and Santiago cant be shot in tactical screen)

 
As summary i would give 80% or 4 of 5 Stars- It was fun to play Jagged Allaince 3. But for challenge & tactical fun & depth, JA2 was better, imo.
I have done only a speedrun, but suppose to play it only with some modded adjustments again. First play was like a tutorial, next time ill choose "dead is dead", for a more challenging expierence.
 
I would like to read your summarys here. Could be also interesting for both devs and JA2 fan base. After some reviews we could summarize.

[Sargrat]

Totally agree with 5Cents analysis.
For me, JA3 is an arcade easy version of JA2.
After an hour, i prefer to stop (and i think to reinstall my JA2).
Maybe one day, someone will do a mod JA2 total conversion, if possible.