Already a very fun game by itself, but with the 1.13 mod it becomes a mindblowing simulator, probably the most fun I've had in a turn based tactical game EVER
Please for the love of everything, stay away from this trash. If you want a sidescrolling castlevania type with a dark atmosphere, do yourself a favor and play Dead Cells, it's superior in LITERALLY every way gameplay wise. The grotesque imagery is great, and all the religious symbolism is pretty cool too, but the gameplay is awful. Just abysmal. There's not one fun thing you can do in this game. Your sword is underpowered, the enemies are overpowered, the environment kills you, and every time you die you have to walk all the way back to where you died so that you recover your spirit otherwise you will be EVEN MORE UNDERPOWERED. There's elements of a good, even great game in here, but as it is right now, it's an exercise in frustration
Hilariously bad, the game doesn't even attempt to mask how poorly balanced it is. I am a very patient gamer, a huge fan of turn based tactical games and Jagged Alliance in particular - I finished JA:Deadly Games, JA2, Unfinished Business, JA3. Finished even 1.13 with submods like Arulco Revisited and AIMNAS. I've played and finished obscure turn based tactical games like Bionic Battle Mutants, Codex of Victory, Templar Battleforce, Fallout Tactics, Phantom Doctrine, and many many more I'm sure I'm forgetting. Jagged Alliance 2 Wildfire is probably the worst of the lot, the balancing is incredibly poor that the command you'll use most often is Quicksave/Quickload. Your mercs are paper thin and cannot seem to hit enemies in standing in wide open areas, yet the enemies have a preternatural ability to snipe even with crappy handguns. To the point where you can be clad in Kevlar, lying prone in tall grass, behind a tree, and it will all mean nothing against a blue (entry level enemy) guy with a 9mm pistol who can fire three shots and take out your merc in one turn without missing once. Same guy you can shoot at with a Colt Commado 5.56 rifle and miss all 3 shots. This happens constantly. I got so far as to liberate Chitzena in this version, but this game is an exercise in frustration, by far the weakest of the classic Jagged Alliance games. Steer clear and stick with 1.13 and its submods, even at a discounted price of $1.79 Wildfire feels like a ripoff
This game has all the makings of a cult classic. Excellent storyline, incredible atmosphere, nostalgia factor (anybody who played Sanitarium can instantly recognize the influence), some very good writing... Unfortunately, it all falls flat because the puzzle logic is terribly illogical. I'll give you an example: if you want to hold a door open, you use a dirty wet towel on it! Because that makes perfect sense, right? Well, regardless, the way the game goes about not informing you your actions are insufficient is both infuriating and insufficient. In this example, you open the door and the door closes immediately. The character gives no indication that he expects something else. The game gives no indication that it's expecting you to keep the door open. There is no prompt, dialogue, symbol, pointer or anything to make you think that you're supposed to hold that door open with anything, and only by using every single item in my inventory with every single item in the room did I finally manage to hold that door open for long enough to proceed in the game. In basically every point and click adventure game I've played, the game gives you some sort of prompt or indication that your current action is insufficient. Not in this game. You can remain stuck in one place, doing the same things over and over and the game AT NO POINT will try to give you any sort of hint or prod to look at something else or look at something differently. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying puzzle solutions should be spoon fed to people, but when your puzzle logic is obtuse, having no prompt that what you're doing is wrong only leads to frustration. Some of the puzzles in this game are so stupidly obscure that a walkthrough is the only way to move forward. Which is very unfortunate since all the other elements of the game are top notch
This version available on here has no setup program available which does not allow you to configure the game's sound output, which means there is no voice acting which if I recall correctly the CD version contains. But even if I'm misremembering as it's been over 15 years since I first played Sea Legends, this version that GOG supplies barely plays. The mouse movement is off-kilter, moving twice as fast on the horizontal as on the vertical, and the game gives you 0 access to the setup program that all these old DOS games come with, which means you can't select a different sound output than the default one GOG used for the version. As such, you're basically stuck with a midi soundtrack that doesn't really do the game justice. The terrible controls that gog opted for make the game nearly unplayable, and the lack of voice acting ruins what little nostalgic appeal this game might have
This game has all the elements of a good, even great turn based RPG, but almost all the fights - and it's a combat focused game - are almost entirely down to RNG, at least in the early game. Without you doing anything particularly different, you can replay the first battle over and over and each and every time you'll get a completely different result based on the "dice" "rolls" the game uses. And this applies to literally every single fight in the game. It wouldn't be so bad if the percentages the game shows you weren't completely arbitrary, more along the lines of suggestions than any actual hard math. Miss 3 attacks in a row that the game said had a "90%" chance to hit. Hit an enemy with each party member, that the game said had between a 10%-30% chance to hit. The damage seems entirely randomized too, I hit a Vampire with a +1 Silver Longsword with a Warrior that has 18 STR and he deals 4 damage - that is when the game decides my guy should hit him: strike 3 times with 75-90% Hit Chance and miss... Hit the same vampire with my Wizard armed with an iron dagger - with 10% CTH - and my wizard deals 5 damage. Just baffling numbers all around, and it gets **extremely** frustrating when you realize the math doesn't actually follow the rules the game says it does. As it plays right now, this game is a lot more like gambling than it is a role playing game. Yes, I know luck is big part of RPGs, but you can also make up for crappy luck with smart tactics and intelligent approaches. Unfortunately, this game doesn't even allow you to do that: every single enemy, from the brainless zombie to the smartest dragon, instinctively knows to go after my spell casters even when they don't actually do anything to attract aggro. So you just have to hope the enemies miss and your guys hit, otherwise Load Game becomes your most used in-game option. The game would be so, so much better if the behind-the-scenes math would be less random and the game less straight up luck based.
