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)...
