Jagged Alliance

My very first game for PC. I bought GTA because of a demo but then realised that it did not run on my 486 machine. I hated this day. Then I just traded with a guy in my class (we became best friends for long time after that). He gave my Jagged Alliance, never heard of it. But better than a nonworking game. Boy ... this game was so nice. Especially if you are young and you have something like imagination. The very first surprise when your soldiers sunk in the river because of the snake or because their endurance went down. Epic. I never knew exactly what to do and how to use the equipment but still could finish it. For some reason didn't have the same luck in JA2.

What to do when you've beat XCOM 2 for the umpteenth time, but you're still hankering for some serious, turn-based, squad combat? I thought Jagged Alliance might be my answer. And it was, mostly. It has a strategic overview map where you expand your territory and defend what's yours. You use a squad of hand-picked mercs from a roster of wonderfully RPG-heavy characters to expand or defend the grids on a large, island map. And many of your combat missions end in close calls. JA feels very rogue-like in that aspect (in spite of the static mac quadrants.) Jagged Alliance is also beautiful to behold. For an old guy like myself, who's played computer games since the late 1980s, it's wonderful to see the pixel-graphics and music brimming with stylish charm and nostalgia, much in the vein of the 8/16-bit indy title's we've been seeing for the past decade But--oh, the proverbial but!--JA lacks so much. There's little in-game help on the game's mechanics. To figure out not just the ins and outs of the game, such as the obscure keyboard commands that have no onscreen graphical representation, you must rely on a Google-searched PDF of Jagged Alliance's gameplay manual. It took me 2 games to figure out that you had to press "C" to compress time to get to the next day and progress the game, rather than click "abort", which is basically a glorified quickload button that blows away the day's progress in favor of that morning's breifing room. I suppose it's due to the game being so old. UI's have changed a lot. Sir-Tech could have taken a HUGE cue from SimTex's "Master of Magic", with its stout gameplay manual giving you every stat and number that's used to calculate the game's outcomes, and an included 30-page spellbook to boot. Try this title for sure--the price is right! But be ready to manage every breath of your squad (which I LOVE), and be sure to have a firm understanding of the load/save mechanic, as well as the turn/day progression (compress time)...

Started playing when this came out in the 90's and never finished it. Played on easy (since this game is pretty treatcherous when it comes to budget, healing mercs and interrupts). It was a blast. Tip: don't be shy to read up on how to save Brenda and cure virus, the game is again pretty brutal and does not offer a lot of information on how to resolve quests.

The game is filled with lots of fun and strategic decisions. After arriving you begin with choosing your team. The best mercenaries are expensive and you're not making much money in the beginning so you have to balance quality/quantity when picking your team (tip: make sure you choose specks with his near 100 mechanic lvl. He is the guy you want to leave at the base to repair all equipment). When you have made sure you have the mercs you want (or the ones you can affort) you can begin planning the day (letting the mercs rest, train, repair and later on when the fighting has started and mercs get hurt to be a doctor or to be the patient that needs threatment). Also great is the option that if you find certain items in the field you can use them to upgrade your inventory. Finding a bottle, gasoline, oil and a cloth makes for a nice molotov coctail and finding a teapot spout let's you upgrade your guns for extra firepower (make sure to save the spouts for the m-16 and m-14's later on when you really really need the edge). The game gives you (besides the daily recapturing of sectors) missions from time to time that you will need to accomplish in a certain timeframe (example: day one find the stolen machinepart.). If you like strategy and loved x-com for example then this is the game for you.

Bushes and trees are often so dense that it is often hard to see where mercs can walk, hide or shoot. It often ends with mercs shooting trees or bushes instead of the enemies, Movement points are so few, that there is often no real alternative to stay in cover and shoot, since the next good cover is too far away and there is usually no indication if any other position might enhance the position. The user interface is strange, the inventory management bad, But the game has it's unique personalities which are better than in any other game franchise and it's fundament for tactial combat which is perfected in JA2. The strategic element (sector handling) adds a more depth to the game, which is absent in JA Deadly Games. But ultimately the tactial part in this game depends often more on luck than on skills. Which leads to a lot frustration. Play and replay JA2, but forget about this game.