Jagged Alliance 2: Unfinished Business

aka: JA2:UB, Jagged Alliance 2.5: Unfinished Business
Moby ID: 3177
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

Arulco calls again upon the player's help to rid of a new threat. This time, the threat comes from Arulco's former mining corporation: Ricci Mining and Exploration. After losing control over the mines during the civil war (Jagged Alliance 2), they now want those mines back. Ricci Mining and Exploration have established a missile base in the neighboring country of Tracona and threaten to attack Arulco with missiles unless their demands are met , and hey already blew up the Tixa prison as a warning. At Enrico's request, the player is to travel to the area suspected to contain the missile base, this time near the border of Tracona. The mission: locate the missile base and destroy it.

Jagged Alliance 2: Unfinished Business is the first standalone expansion for Jagged Alliance 2, from which it can import characters. Among the new content are the new storyline, different AI, new character development options, new characters, new weapons and new tactical features like display of sight range and cover opportunities. The game also comes with a campaign editor. The map is much smaller, containing about 20 accessible sectors, considerable part of which are underground.

Appropriate to the mission, the militia training feature does not exist in this game. In this, Unfinished Business is more similar to the original Jagged Alliance than to its sequel.

Spellings

  • JA 2.5: Цена свободы - Russian spelling
  • 铁血联盟2:未完的使命 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

82 People (78 developers, 4 thanks) · View all

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[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 73% (based on 29 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.6 out of 5 (based on 28 ratings with 7 reviews)

Annoying Bugfest

The Good
More Jagged Alliance 2, can't go wrong - or so I thought. The enemies are not really smarter as is sometimes claimed but just follow another routine. Still nice; New tactics on your part are required. First battles are challenging as the enemy will outnumber you and outclass you weapon-wise. After that you get rather showered with equipment. New cool guns. Fun (though few) recruitable characters. Roughly half the game takes place in a bunker which could make for great gameplay, but, see below.

The Bad
Oh my, where to start.

Software: There is no limit to the bugs. Now I hear you say we are used to that from JA2. You are not. The old bugs are negligible in comparison. The game will freeze or crash on you every other 5 minutes, at least on windows XP. I did play from an original CD, but I doubt they were able to fix anything at GOG.

Gameplay: Really short and one-track. Only about 20 accessible sectors. No side-missions, no strategic decisions. Cash is limited, but plenty, time is unlimited (and mercenaries are paid per mission not per day), which feels like cheating since you can spend all the time healing, repairing and training you want. Above ground everything is rather ok, nice challenges, at least two well though out sectors. The problem is below ground. Instead of tactically challenging situations you are faced on numerous occasions with spots where all you can do is turn the corner or move through that door, taking fire. No diversions, no decoys, no alternative routes, no blowing up walls, no decisions to make when to invest heavy gear like LAWs and when to save it (Instead you have lots of LAWs but most walls and doors are immune to them). Realistic? Yes, maybe. Interesting to play? No. Smoke grenades now only work in the enemies favor, that is, he will always see and hit you, you won't, no matter who's in the smoke. In exchange you can sometimes throw grenades at weird angles that did not work for me in JA2. Towards the end of the game it comes down to this: move through door, get hit, shoot back, use regeneration boost you find, rinse, repeat. Occasionally the enemies will be able to shoot through walls (corners), sometimes you can't shoot back. Who gets an interrupt now seems to be entirely random or predetermined. The game seems to intend that you take only one team into the later part of the game but it is easy to use the menus in a way that allow entering with most mercs. If you are prepared for the bugs and freezes that seem to come with it.

Story: Not that important really and basically sound but a few weird elements. Useless blabla emails from Miguel and Enrico. Some dialogue seems nonsensical but maybe that's just me.

The Bottom Line
Don't buy, don't play. First quite promising but then extremely frustrating. Taking the fun out of Jagged Alliance. One time I stopped playing for a few days and the last sector was nothing but "please let it be over soon".

Windows · by Tomthesecond (26) · 2011

The title should be Jagged Alliance 2: Unfinished Period.

The Good
Hey, it's Jagged Alliance. What's there not to like? Most of the great gameplay found in Jagged Alliance 2 is still intact, in addition to more 'easy' or user-friendly character creation for those who did not import their star character from the previous JA 2.

The Bad
This is hardly a game, honestly. Compared to JA2, this is game is only 5 minutes (dramatizing). I mean this is a VERY SHORT GAME if you (somehow) didn't understand my previous sentence. The map is small(er) me thinks compared to JA2, plus the fact that they erased the 'train militia' option, this game became VERY easy to play. Basically, this game became JA 1: Unfinished Business. The one major difference between JA 1 and JA 2 was the militia option, making it more than a micro mercenary war game. The presence of the train militia made it a more macro strategy game.

The Bottom Line
It's playable. Just don't expect too much, in comparison to JA 2. Good thing it's a stand-alone game, Heroes of Might and Magic made better sequals than this. Doh.

Windows · by Indra was here (20756) · 2004

Killing has never been so fun!

The Good
At first glance this seems like your normal addon, new weapons, new characters, and a new but smaller campaign. Well, that's not true, the new campaign is totally different from the original. It's competely linear, you go from sector to sector, and the element of silver mines, multiple squads and etc... are completely gone. This doesn't have to be a bad thing though. The game can actually be best compared to the JA2 demo, the demo had only two maps which had no variations, you meet the enemies at the same place and all. In the full version of JA2 it wasn't like this, the enemy was constantly moving, the enemy placement was mostly random. In that regard JA2 has massive replayability since things were different each time, but JA2UB can also be more fun in another aspect, the authors had more freedom in UB when making the missions since nothing was random, the missions made were exactly as they would be played, so the missions can be a whole lot more fun as they have more substance then JA2's missions (although the essence of replayability is totally gone in UB). Unfortunately, this isn't totally so, the levels are not well made, but I'll get back to that later.

About the other new things. There's two new handy options you can use in tactical warfare, with two buttons you can see where your current mercenary can shoot, and where it's best for him to take cover. This is a nice feature, although I doubt you'll use it any much... at least I didn't, most of time you should know yourself where to take cover. There's some new mercenaries, including a tourist you met in JA2, and an oldtimer from JA1. The new mercs are completely cool, they have perfect voice acting and unique personalities. Although there's one stupid thing here, at one point in the game, it's random whether or not you'll meet a certain merc. And if you don't meet him, you'll just have to start a new game to see if you meet him then. This is not good, I especially hated it since I knew beforehand about this merc and I really wanted him on my team and check him out, but no, I didn't meet him, and I really don't feel like playing it again just to meet him since the game really doesn't bring anything new the second time around.

The new weaponry kicks ass, the most obvious addition is three new sniper rifles which change the game totally. Those who say that the sniper rifles in the original JA2 was useless then check this out, they are a lot more powerful than the ones in JA2. With these rifles the game is definately more interesting. Yeah, one thing I almost forgot, you can also import any savegame from JA2 to use your old custom merc into this game, there's even new speech made for all the custom merc voices which is a nice touch.

The Bad
As I mentioned the missions aren't designed any well. Well, this both true and untrue, the missions are fun, but not as fun as they could have been. With the design of UB they had so much more freedom in the design of the sectors, but the missions just felt like generic-map-with-random-enemies similar to JA2. Another bad thing is the imbalanced difficulty setting. The game starts right off where JA2 left, you have powerful weaponry, the enemies have high stats and powerful weapons. This is more than okay for outdoors sectors, but when you get to buildings things get really dull. Indoor combat: the AI feels like camping all the time and waits for you to walk to them, the enemies have the best weapons and high stats so if they see you, they get the first shot, they don't miss, and they kill straight away. This spoils a lot of the fun, the element of strategy is completely gone, your only choice is to constantly sacrifice one of your troops to kill the enemies.

This is the major flaw though, but there's some other minors, the campaign is small, the art of the new weapons is very dull and uninspired, and the game has some bugs here and there.

The Bottom Line
I enjoyed the game, but that's probably mainly because I'm such a big JA2 fan that anything else would be impossible. What really saves the game is the level editor with the game. There's already a great deal of fanmade campaigns posted around the net to prolong your bloodshed, and most of them seems a lot more fun than the original standard campaign too. The game is a must have for any JA2 fan, sure there are flaws and you can complete the game in a few days, but you can always make more missions yourself or just download some. For those who haven't played any JA game, don't buy this one, start with buying JA2, it's definately the best in the series.

Windows · by Kate Jones (416) · 2001

[ View all 7 player reviews ]

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Kasey Chang.

Macintosh added by Cavalary.

Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, Indra was here, JRK, Stratege, Plok.

Game added January 31, 2001. Last modified March 19, 2024.