Jagged Alliance, one of the best squad based strategy games out there, able to rub shoulders with games such as the X-Com series, has been sadly ignored for the past 13 years. The previous installment being Jagged Alliance 2, where a mercenary and his hired band of thugs, murderers, and psychopaths aid in the revolution of the fictional country of Alruco. You are able to purchase weapons, pay for insurance policies on your mercs, and even send flowers to the queen of Alruco. If only to watch her bitch-slap her hapless servant.
Fortunately, the Jagged Alliance series has returned with the latest title, Jagged Alliance: Back in Action. This latest title brings back the fun of ordering around a mob of bloodthirsty mercenaries in the attempt to save the people of Alruco. The developers have worked to try to capture the same spirit of the original, and I feel they have succeeded. The mercenaries are varied and you'll have fun reading their background information and dossiers. Many of them have bonuses and penalties based around their psyche, for instance a model turned mercenary has a huge morale boost when fighting naked.
The types of weapons are varied including but not limited to pistols, SMGs, shotguns, rocket launchers, rifles, etc. Each character has his or her own skillset, mechanics can pick locks and repair guns, medics can inject morphine and use medkits, demo men can use C4 to blow open weakened walls to gain entrance. All can generally point a gun at something and pull the trigger until whatever is on the wrong end of it is dead, just tends to miss a lot more than the dedicated soldiers.
The interface is intuitive, the buttons often having a very clear definition of what they do, and if you have a question the game offers tooltips. The mechanics are very well put together, giving you all the information you need in a firefight, such as line of sight and a general idea where your merc will be shooting to help avoid friendly fire. My one complaint is that your mercs can't peek around a corner in order to fire from cover, but you can find the usual waist high barricades to duck behind in a pinch.
The graphics are beautiful, showing great detail that usually would not be needed in a strategy game like this. Gunfire shatters concrete, digs holes in ground, and of course puts holes in your enemies. Each bullet clearly shows an impact with effects depending on the terrain hit, helping you see how close, or how far away the shooter is to their target.
What will probably be the most controversial, especially to people who grew up playing the original Jagged Alliance 2 is the change from pure turn based strategy to a mixture of real time and turn based. The 'Plan and go' system allows you to pause the action, selecting mercs individually to tell them where to go, set way points, and tell them when to fire. You can set options to let it pause automatically, such as when spotting, or being spotted by an enemy. This lets you give orders without having to rely on your reflexes when your team is under fire.
I personally feel its a good thing because when you are simply rehashing the same game over and over again it quickly leads to stagnation. The developers held onto that original feeling and spirit of the Jagged Alliance games, and used new ideas and mechanics to give the players the best control they could give over their team.
I have not yet completed the game, as it only just came out. (I'm not /that/ good.) From what I have seen however, it is very much the remake that the original deserves and so much more.
The ultimate question, is it worth it? Yes, very much so. You can while away the hours with tactical planning, training militia, and selecting your weapons. The destruction and mayhem you can create is amazingly cathartic, and in the end you're leading a band of psychopaths across a country, cutting a bloody swathe through enemy soldiers.
Lock and load; it's time to overthrow a dictatorship.
E-Tank
(Edited by Nathan 'Miles' Davis)
