Jagged Alliance 2

I played this game nearly twenty years ago on the recommendation of a friend, and I was HOOKED. From the array of guns, the long campaign, the reloading and saving of games to maximize your tactics, the thinking and planning needed to attack certain areas and the absolute masterpiece dialogues with the characters, Jagged Alliance IS THE GOLD STANDARD for turn-based RPGs and has earned its rightful place in the hall of fame. You're tasked with retaking a country that has been taken over by an evil queen. With a one time payment from an exiled leader, you're in charge of hiring mercenaries based on an array of skill sets that you alone need to determine are useful for your mission. Each character has its dialogue choices and the game is even coded to provide different interactions based on mercs. Some mercs will refuse to be hired if you have others already in your retinue. The game has a map with a variety of cities and other locations waiting to be discovered. You're required to take over mines in order to fund your mercenary operations. The game's campaign will have you plan and think your approach to certain cities. Tactics are essential along with the careful placing of mercenaries to be granted that sweet, sweet interrupt. The game can be maddeningly frustrated if you rush head first into battle without taking advantage of the terrain. You can also be rewarded with careful planning with a thoughtful selection of mercs who have a wide range of skills. As well, there are a variety of community created mods that you can install with a Vanilla JA2 copy that bring new weapons, characters and campaigns. The newer JA games unfortunately went in a different direction, being picked up and abandoned by different developers. Irrespective of whatever novelties these games brought, none of them have the JA2 spirit which makes this game just a pleasure to play, even 20 years later. Ian Currie and his team create a timeless, highly playable gem. Love live JA2!

I'm continually shocked and appalled that nobody has bothered to make a game that plays quite like this one. It's an excellent concept - you need to be a combination of financier, quartermaster and small unit tactician, working as a small, elite group of mercs to clear out numerically superior foes. There really should be more of games that play like this. You could easily make one of these turn based tactical games about a team of green berets in hostile territory (Hey, US Army? I'd PAY you to play that one. I'd enlist to play that one!) And yet it stands alone in it's class. I don't think there IS another TBT game out there that is anything like Jagged Alliance 2. I could go into a long discussion of the game's mechanics, story and gameplay, but really, what's the point? You NEED to play this if you want to consider yourself a tactical gamer. Not only that, but this game has mod potential, and a lot of it. There's one very, very large mod called JA 1.13, which is essentially a final patch to the game that adds a bajillion new weapons and several new features. There must be at least 250 guns in 1.13. (In your face, Combat Arms) It even comes packaged with a mod that fixes bugs in the original game as well as makes tactical maneuvering much more about fire and movement (surpressive fire becomes MUCH more valuable). Why am I still talking about this? GO BUY IT AND PLAY IT. NOW.

Jagged Alliance 2 is a turnbased tactical strategy roleplaying game with the goal to free the state of "Arulco" of its evil Queen Deidranna. It is widely cited as the best of its genre even today and other than most titles of the era, is just as playable today as back in the day. Even the graphics are still pretty to look at, thanks to the rich details of the cities and landscapes, the smooth animation and everything in the game looking distinguishable from each other, even if it does not have to. There are for example tons of unique looks to the standard red-shirt Soldier that you will face as the main enemy, showing off his body strengh, weapon, different skin and haircolor and even camouflage. During the gameplay you will free different cities to earn money for weapons and Mercenaries, each one with its own Personality, Stats, Equipment and fully voiced. You can even make your own one at the beginning of the game. The difficulty, number of weapons or realism of the game is tweakable to your personal desire, its easily approachable, never too complicated and supports every style you want to use. The Controls are thought out and very easy to understand, even though there are tons of things to do you can play the whole game only with a mouse and nothing else. You can use keyboard shortcuts, but you dont have to. The Gameplay consists of two Parts. Part One plays out on the overview map, on which one moves Mercenaries between sectors of a grid based map, trains Mercs or Milita in free cities or visits the "World Wide Web". There you can hire new Mercenaries, buy weapons, repair your items or read emails concerning ingame Events. Most Mercs have people they like or dislike and tasks they prefer, as well as unique reactions to many situations or PCs and NPCs. The Meat of the Game however is the second Part. And that one is HUGE! With Mercs in a sector, you will at first move them around in real time. You can talk to people, buy stuff from local shops, build your own equipment from junk, buy a car to get around faster, pick locks to enter civilian homes, find clues to secret places, equip your mercs, visit the whorehouse or get some extra missions. Should one of your soldiers then spot an enemy , or an enemy see or hear you, it will change to tactical turn based combat. Unlike any other game I have ever played, Jagged Alliance 2 has this part FULLY REALISED. First off, you have three different stances. Standing, crouching and lying on the ground. You can move and shoot in all of these stances, but a rocket launcher or throwing a grenade will require you standing. You can also hide behind rocks and bushes or climb on a flat roof, aim, using more or less Action Points each round to shoot more precisely or more often, sneak around, run or walk and a whole lot more. You can apply camouflage and boost your own ability too see during day(sunglasses), night(nightvision googles) or hear(headphone with sound enhancing). You can shoot, stab or punch, use tear gas, mustard gas or explosive grenades or even use rocket launchers and Dynamite. Using Explosives or Rocket launchers will alter the landscapes for the rest of the game, as you blast away walls with enemies behind them or to make a new route and your enemies will do the same. And thats the most fun part, as you can use one merc with camouflage and silenced machine guns to sneak through the night and kill the enemy without him ever noticing you were there or go in guns blazing with as many guys you like, to lay waste to the houses and blow the enemy out of his holes. You may even combine the two and flank the enemy with your stealthy merc. That part never gets old and as you progress and your Mercenaries get better at the tasks they do, so do the enemies. You will get tons of new weapons and recruit some unique NPCs, but the enemy will send better equipped troups too and has many unique NPCs in his ranks to make the Combat more personal. By the end of the game you may have fought Giant Tigers(Blood Cats), four kinds of soldiers, a ton of NPCs, a whole different army of a another party in the Land, tanks and of course the queen and her personal assistants. If you activated the Science Fiction Mode of the Game, there will even be 4 types of giant Alien Cockroaches and a big Mother-Alien type thing. You will have freed cities , build up a milita and fought alongside them agains invading enemy forces. You will have met many colorful NPCs with sometimes funny, sometimes sad, but always good storys and personalitys. You will have discovered tons of weapons and Items and trained your mercs in all kinds of things, including bandaging, lock picking, kicking in doors, using explosives, shooting, etc. and freed cities and anti Air bases, get captured only to free yourself again... or maybe you will miss half of the stuff from this list because your style of play does not require it. Its completely up to you, but its always fun :)

JA2 is definitely one of the best games ever made. Still playable in 2020 with lots of additional mods available (JA 2. 1.13) that make the game even more epic. If you dont know JA2, you should get it and play it, this is an absolute masterpiece that is yet to be replaced by anything that comes close to its detail, love and gameplay. Thanks for making this game and giving me 3000+ hours to sunk into

Superb strategy game form years gone by. Very much in the Xcom style. Worth every penny and if you don't have it, you owe it to yourself to get it now.!