Jagged Alliance

The Good
Thanks to my father, I got started with strategy games early. Chess, Stratego, a few of the old Avalon Hill board games, etc. It doesn't necesarily mean I'm all that good at them, but I enjoy them immensly. When I got introduced to computers, my love of Strategy games was already set. X-COM was my first squad-based tactical game, and I loved it. After I was done kicking alien butt, I wanted something a little more recent. I never found it until recently. I found Jagged Alliance on an old abandonware site, and instantly fell in love with it. It had money management, a strong tactical game, a little bit of adventure-game-like inventory management, and it had personality. I'll get to that in a bit.

In Jagged Alliance you have been hired by Jack to take back Metavira island from one of his renegade assistants, Santino. The prize? The sap from a tree that only grows on Metavira. This sap is turned into a medecine that can heal many sick people (of what is never really mentioned). You, in turn, hire other mercenaries to do this job.

This is where the personality is. Each merc (there are about 50 of them) has their own voice, and personality. Some mercs will not join you because they hate someone you already have on staff. Some grow to hate certain mercs over time. I have hired some of the worst ones, just so that I could hear them speak. This reason, among others, made me want to buy my own copy.

Once you have a team, you go sector by sector, reclaiming the island. Of course there are always a few side trips, like the poisoned water supply, a stolen headstone, and of course, the kidnapping of Brenda (Jack's daughter and head scientist).

This games does many things well. The character personality is good, the controls are fairly intuitive, and the challenge is good, especially on the hardest level.

The Bad
There are a few things wrong with the game. The music, while appropriate in mood, can be pretty repetetive. I usually turn it all the way down, and turn my radio up. The enemy AI does leave a little to be desired. There will be times when the enemy just seems to want to die. They stand out in the open emptying their clips from out of range of their weapons. And while the challenge is good, sometimes it translates into more enemies, rather than smarter ones.

The Bottom Line
In the end, this is a good game. The positive outshines the negative very well. Anyone that enjoyed X-COM, or any other squad-based game should really check this out.

The Good
I like the tactical combat of this game. The sector management and conquest isn't very sophisticated, but it does make the game a lot more interesting than a linear tactical RPG where you can't pick your battles and territories.

I think the most exciting part is choosing and managing your mercs. They're all very well-defined both in stats and personality. They often make remarks that breathe so much life into each mission.

The Bad
The game lacks the character-building/leveling elements of most RPG games. To me, the appeal of most RPG games comes from taking weak characters and making them strong. This is just a personal preference and my review is very personal. Don't expect to do this in this game. The characters progress way too slowly to make them worthwhile in a long run.

You can't expect to hire a bunch of weak level 1 mercs and level them up to a point where they surpass the more expensive mercs that you can hire later on in the game. Their skills develop far too slowly, whether in the field or with dedicated time spent for training. If you end up getting a pathetic character to a high level, he/she will still be pretty pathetic and won't even be close to the other high level characters you can hire to replace them. The characters are meant to be disposable. You're going to want them to be killed off or fired in the late game to replace them with better mercs.

This need to replace characters is the one thing that really turns me off about this game. I want to have a band of mercs that I want to build up myself. It's been forever since I beat the game, but the only unit I remember keeping from beginning to end was Ivan, who was supernaturally good for a level 2 character anyway.

Aside from this, the tactical combat suffers because of extremely poor firing accuracy. The battles are unnecessarily long and tedious and very random because of how easy it is to miss. Even with a merc with 90+ firing accuracy, it's a pretty special feeling just to get in a hit from medium range because the overall firing accuracy is so horrible. Terrain and cover doesn't do much for the game either because when you're behind cover, you just seem to have as much chance of your shot not going through the tree or whatever you're behind as the enemy does of hitting the tree instead of you, so your own cover ends up getting in your way. The kneel feature could have been really useful but it wasn't put to use the way it should have been.

The maps are also far too big. If you think X-Com is annoying when you are down to one hidden unit on a map that takes 30 turns to find, just wait till you see Jagged Alliance. I've spent an entire day (in game time, not real time - maybe 20-30 minutes of actual time in reality) searching for a single unit. They move around like crazy and with your small party it can be a nightmare to spot the last enemy. Mobilizing your force across the map in turn-based time is also a major management pain. It makes you want to sacrifice strategy and have the most agile guy just move ahead of everyone and dispatch the enemies just out of laziness.

The Bottom Line
This is a pretty fun game if you like tactical RPGs. I just don't agree with other people though who think it's as good or better than X-Com mainly because of the lack of character building (X-com not only has this but also combines a far more sophisticated management game) and the less sophisticated and far more tedious tactical combat.

The Good
I liked everything about this game. There's nothing about it that I don't like. I never understood why this game failed to generate the same popularity and fan devotion as the X-Com series, a game series which features the same style of play (turn-based squad-level combat) but has far less personality than Jagged Alliance.

Now, don't get me wrong. I liked the X-Com games immensely. But Jagged Alliance has everything X-Com has, PLUS it has oodles of attitude and personality. In X-Com, your little soldiers were interchangeable, with randomly generated stats, randomly generated names, randomly generated appearances, and ZERO personality.

In Jagged Alliance, your soldiers are not members of the interchangeable brigade. Your soldiers have personality. They have attitude. Some of them even have style. Some mercs have past grudges against other mercs and won't work with you if you have the other merc on your team. Some will form a brand new grudge against another merc after a day or two working together. Sometimes, the person with the grudge is also a little...unhinged, and the merc he dislikes will simply disappear in the night...

And what a selection of mercs!

• Tex, the Japanese cowboy-wannabe who peppers his speech with "pardner" and "cowpie" -- all with a thick Japanese accent.
• Fidel, the fanatical explosives expert who's great with bombs, but who doesn't like to switch targets until the first one is dead.
• Ivan, a former officer for the USSR's Red Army, now pursuing capitalism with vigor. (Ivan turns out to be the best bargain in the game, because he's cheap, and he kicks serious butt. Doesn't speak a lick of English, though, so you have to learn what his Russian phrases mean...)
• Hurl, the hypochondriac merc who's good with bandages just because he tends to use them on himself -- whether he needs them or not.
• Sparky, the valley girl merc who comes from a family of guns for hire (her brothers Gary and Larry are also in the game, and her father Leon shows up in one of the sequels).
• Vinny, the mechanic with the mafia past.

...and many more! All told, there are almost 50 mercs available for hire throughout the game. Some are cheap and inexperienced, but gain experience and skill during the course of the game. Others are experienced, and therefore expensive, and you won't be hiring them until the late stages of the game when you can afford their fees. And each one has a distinctive, memorable personality that will stick in your head long after you finish the game. (I still remember Fidel's confident analysis of "It have bomb BUT it no problem!", or Skitz's psychopathic "I'm all out of bullets...and I'm gettin' really paranoid..." whenever he would run out of ammo.)

Coupled with this wonderful personality is a game engine that any X-Com devotee would be familiar with. You guide your squad of mercs through the jungle in turn-based combat. The ability of your mercs to perform actions is based on their Time Units, and each action takes a certain number of units. You can run your mercs across a field, burning up all their units, or you can have them save some in reserve for opportunity fire.

Overlaying all of the action is an ongoing storyline regarding the island your mercs are trying to recover from the bad guys. Sometimes you find secret notes leading to a hidden cache of weapons if you take a certain sector on a certain day. Sometimes you have to do sneaky, single-merc missions into a factory where the enemy has to be neutralized silently lest someone blow the factory up, setting your progress back a few days.

All in all, Jagged Alliance is a great, great game. It's a shame that it's never gotten the recognition it deserves.

The Bad
Nothing. There wasn't a thing about the game I disliked.

The Bottom Line
A fabulous, funny turn-based squad-level combat game, like X-Com, but with tons more personality.