Jagged Alliance 2

This is the game that defines the tactical turn-based RPG genre, along with X-Com. It's aged extremely well, due in part to the excellent graphics. (in particular, the guns. Oh, so many guns...) There just aren't many games that get so many things right, and JA2 is one of them.

This game stands in my top 5 of all time. I'v been gaming for 19 years now, constantly. If you haven't played this game before..you should. Go to bear pit forums and download the 1.12 Mod.. It adds hundreds of new weapons, new gameplay features and MERC's.. It makes a fantastic game even more so. I'm not going to go into any detail over the game, buy it, experience it, love it.

Actually I`m a pretty heavy gamer, and I always own a strong CPU however this TBS game caught my eyes / attention even from the beginning. I keep downloading it every few years and re-play it. Awesome feeling, excellent texting and blend. I hope the 2011 version about to come, won`t disappoint fans. a Must-have

I have been playing this game on and off for 13 years. I still have a saved game backed up somewhere that represents 3-4 months of continuous game play, and I could still never beat it, or even get close really. I continuously built up better and better squads until I could pretty much over-power most parts of the map, but the SAM sites and other treachery (and bugs) were too much to handle. Still, for all it's difficulty, and strange archaic interface, I think this is one of the greatest game experiences I've ever had. It's a difficult game and you have to put your time in but it pays you back by challenging you and treating you like an adult who wants a deep strategic challenge. The hand-written interfaces are priceless and wonderful. Calling the graphics "dated" just isn't the correct way of going about it. I've read the code. This is the old days when things were blitted into DirectDraw buffers using brute force assembly language, before hardware acceleration. That basically means that the original devs wrote the graphics engine along with the masterful gameplay, story, design and everything else. and it's wonderful! It wouldn't be done that way now, where current devs rely on lots of 3rd party solutions, engines, etc, and write to APIs, then they just wrote the whole thing lock-stock and barrel for the IBM PC system which seemed to be the market leader at the time. Consequently, I think you get a better product in the end. Something that probably represents the blood and sweat and life-essences of tens of thousands of man hours of pouring over code and other nerdy goodness. Pretty unconventional review as I never addressed the game itself, but I'll leave that to others. Jagged Alliance is as great as they come for classic games.

That word "masterpiece" is often used too easily to describe a game you really loved, but in this case, it is entirely appropriate. The core mechanics, premise and writing in this game are so pristine that even today, there are very few games that come close to the breadth and depth of its scope. Why it hasn't been remade by a reputed developer for modern day systems is an abiding mystery to me. But fear not - the original is still so good a game, and has aged so well (even graphically) that it will suck you into its retro addictiveness almost immediately. I won't bother giving you details on the setting or gameplay - other reviews here have done so well enough. I will tell you, though, that this gem will be hailed in decades to come as one of those rare examples of an art form at its absolute pinnacle. This is a game you owe it to yourself to play, just so you can experience game design and execution that has often been imitated, but rarely - if ever - equaled. Buy it NOW. It is a landmark in the evolution of games as an interactive entertainment medium.