I did the fake 3D thing because I wanted to try it out and I think it looks cool. Initially I also had planned to have more layers, so you could see elevation, but in my tests the difference was barely noticeable, so I scratched that idea. As it currently is, it indeed does not add much to the game. I feared that in 2D the image would be too flat and that you could not make out the edges of the cliffs, but with the shadow in place it works quite well. Here's an image of the 2D map:
