Jagged Alliance

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.