One of the most abused, but beloved turn-based tactical PC franchises is back with another game. Earlier attempts go from abysmal to somewhat playable but often lacking soul. Through some fantastic luck (and skill?) this time it actually captures the classic feeling and is fun to boot.
Jagged Alliance 3 has the essence of what once was, which is a rare instance of something old being updated to modern times and still manages to retain an old-school gaming feeling. It’s not without faults though. For example, the laptop shenanigans from
Jagged Alliance 2 have been transferred over, but it has not been fully explored, which makes it feel like a cheap copy of the original. The basics are there, yet, all the fun flair, or at least most of it, is gone. The
A.I.M mercenary recruitment page no longer comes off as a normal website either. Luckily other parts have much more effort put into it – like the combat, and story, which in turn makes this a worthwhile sequel to a fabled game.
Paradise lost
Another paradise island, another troubled region ravaged by war – this time: Africa. We are hired by the daughter of the kidnapped president to save her father and restore order to the country of Grand Chien. This will by done by capturing or killing the elusive “
The Colonel” that started this resurrection that eventually turned the country to a hellscape of violence. Sounds like a relativity simple task, right? Just like kicking Dedrianna’s ass in
Jagged Alliance 2. Well, as it turns out, this task won’t be so straightforward as that. I’m not going to spoil anything, but one thing this sequel has over what it’s based on is a bit more intriguing narrative with a couple of twists and turns. I found the pacing and story beats pretty good, even if it can get bogged down in endless sidequests from time to time since there are a ton of them – ranging from great to seemingly meaningless to the overall storyline.
One thing I have to point out that I found great, as this is a true sequel that follows the overall “plot” of the Jagged Alliance games instead of being a remaster of some kind – and that is that
Jagged Alliance 3 is only set one year after the incident in Arulco which directly continues the mythology of the franchise. It makes the games feel like it has a real connection to each other.
Jagged Alliance 3 constantly references the other games in the series beyond the mercenaries that you can hire. You can find shots of Metaviron that have healing effects, and this item comes from the trees on the island Metavira where the first game takes place. It’s small things like this that make me think much care and knowledge when into this title, and it makes me appreciate it so much more.
Soldiers of fortune
The mercs available for hire have a pretty good range. Both personality and skill-wise. Many fan favorites are back with a few new ones intermixed. From the ones I hired in my playthrough, I found them for the most part humorous – which the writing is in general. It has this 90s style to it, made to entertain instead of preach. It’s a very refreshing thing indeed, considering how stuff is written nowadays when it comes to media entertainment. However, they are a few mercenaries that I just couldn’t stand, like one of the new ones going by the name Livewire (
she also has the most OP object in the game, which tags all opponents that breaks the fun of encounters). There is something with her voice, and her careless attitude that just rubs me the wrong way, but that is not to say all the new mercs are bad. Omryn, which is another recent one, I thought was funny in his constant search for napping and food, even during critical battle moments.
One curious part of the narrative is that the second-rate mercenary company
M.E.R.C is still in the game, however, you can’t hire soldiers from them this time around. What makes their presence interesting though, is that they have already been hired and sent to the island for the same reason you are there. This has some cool and engaging story segments to follow and take part in, especially since these pieces have a nice “detective” feeling to them as you will be following their deals and deeds all over the country. It also rewards those that make an effort to understand the narrative, as many paths will be cut off from you if you don’t invest time to save one of them in need for example.
The overall roleplaying nature of
Jagged Alliance 3 when it comes to choice & consequence is pretty impressive. You will be picking between a lot of hard choices throughout the game that all have story events to play out differently depending on what you do and say. It’s not only you that will take part in these events either, as the mercenaries in your group will interject and react to these events. Many of these tasks will also impact the ending of the game in major ways, so make sure to make informed decisions! I had to replay a large part of the game since I got a show-stopping bug during my first playthrough, but thanks to this I got to see events play out way differently from my first attempt. Most of these things are based on how and when you tackle the different quests and places, but it’s very interesting to see
Jagged Alliance 3 accompanying these acts as you take them on in a different order. It makes it feel like a truly open-ended campaign, even if it has a set storyline.
Lock and load
Now to the meat and potatoes; the shooting and blasting. There will be a few differences from
Jagged Alliance 2 here, but in general, I think they have captured the gritty semi-realistic feeling of the combat from earlier games in the series. One difference here of course is that the game is in full 3D now, with controllable camera and height maps going above one level. The core is the same, though. The turn-based combat is based on “action points”, which will dictate your range of movement and level of aim. At first glance, it might seem a little too close to the
nuXcom games, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. It might share similarities, as it will have a low and a high shield icon to represent cover. However, it isn’t much more than that, it’s just an indicator of cover since the most important difference here is a fully simulated ballistic system. That means you can only shoot and hit things you can actually see, so no abstract bull-crap here – no sir! Just like the good old days in the franchise.
This means that you can fully protect your men by hitting the dust, aka going prone behind chest-high cover – and that makes all the difference. NuXcom got its own style and enjoyment, but nothing can match the combat of a fully simulated physics-based system. It’s still chance based, especially when it comes to hitting stuff, yet, the game doesn’t show it to you. According to the devs, it’s to promote players to engage in firefights, instead of getting caught up in finding the perfect percentage chance before firing. It works too! When you aim, you will still get indicators of your chances to hit, and if a target is blocked by something. So, you are not totally blind out there on the battlefield. When you aim at targets, you can either hit the head, chest, arms, groin, and legs, all with different effects. Hitting an unprotected head will do massive damage, yet, it’s hard to hit. Hitting the chest will be easiest, but often it will be protected by armor. Getting a shot on the arms will lower the target’s aim for a turn. It does not do as much damage, but it might help you during the fight. A groin shot (ouch) will “suppress” the enemy, dropping their AP. And finally, shooting a baddie in the legs will slow him down considerably. Making for example an crazed machete guy not be able to reach you during his turn.
To expand on this,
Jagged Alliance 3 also comes with plenty of different ammo types, and grenades that all have different effects. Hollow-point ammunition will make your targets bleed, and armor-penetrating rounds will wreck protective vests. When it comes to grenades there is a lot of variety too. From gas grenades that will choke your enemies to death, to regular explosives, to molatovs that will set them ablaze. In other words – lots of different ways to murder your fellow man. If that wasn’t enough, beyond skills that you unlock for your mercenaries, the weapons themselves also come with their own specific skill usage. For example, submachine guns come with a hit-and-run skill. This will make the merc take three quick shots against their nearest target along a path you set out. It’s a very useful skill since you can rain down a lot of lead on your enemies with this move. As mentioned, the mercs also get skills when they level up, and there is a lot to pick from based on the stats they have. Also, all of the mercenaries you can hire and find during the campaign have their own specific skill too, which makes them stand out beyond their personality.
Not everything is sunny
There are some issues with the combat, unfortunately. The real-time mode before it switches over to the turn-based combat comes without any pause function, which makes it hard as hell to place your men into the right position before getting spotted. You need the skill levels of a Korean
StarCraft 2 master to manage a full group of six, or more in this mode. I’m not sure why it is like this since a pause function would remove all problems with this mode in one go. Another problem is how stealth works, especially in real-time. It’s abstracted instead of being based on line of sight, as much of the rest of the game – like the combat specifically. It mostly depends on stats (and weather and time of day). But if you get a merc skilled enough when it comes to sneaking through levels and perks, it will allow him to go in front of dudes before stabbing them, and that is very silly. The stealth often takes place in real-time too, which combined with my first mentioned issue, makes it extremely finicky to pull off. If you have not made a master ninja that can vanish in front of people that is.
One of the things that makes me the most annoyed, is the somewhat suicidal AI, in combination with close-quarters soldiers. Enemies will constantly rush you, often with little regard for their own safety, which means you will more often than not play defensively instead of seeking out the enemy. It can get a bit boring at times, and it makes it easy to abuse the poor AI to walk into killing fields of agonizing death. On the issue of close combat soldiers, well, they break all kinds of realism and immersion the game sets up. These specialists are either half-immortal beings or pent up on some kind of godly PCP drug because these dudes are health-bloat-defined. They dish out extremely high damage while being able to withstand horrific wounds. It makes melee units ironically enough the most dangerous to face in a game based on firearms. It just seems a bit backward to me. While they are challenging, they do feel cheap to the setting, and especially cheap just to make the game harder. The AI overall should have been better, taking fewer risks, and in that way forcing the player to probe and seek them out.
I almost forgot, there is already a META forming that sniper rifles are the best weapons. While I can see that this could be true because they are very powerful in the hands of a merc with high marksmanship. However, all weapons are, but I assume it’s the pure range and power of stealth attacks that make them so desirable. Yet, the thing is, this is a single-player game, relying on your own personal enjoyment (or your co-op partner, yes the game has co-op), which means you don’t have to use it. Please, don’t optimize the fun out of your games. I already see this happening on the
Steam forums with people complaining that the combat is no longer fun and that it is too easy. A META forming around a single-player game is meaningless, and sure, calling out overpowered weapons is a good thing, but strictly using tactics that will ruin the game for you seems honestly stupid, well, if you don’t enjoy exploiting game rules that is.
Strategy
On the strategic layer – let’s call it map mode, you move around your team or teams, pick sectors and whatnot to attack or explore. Here you also repair, heal up, train militia, and educate your mercenaries in skills they might not be so great at. Certain areas have specific uses which will pop up on this menu, like taking breaks in the pub and so on. A most welcome deal after a hard battle, let me tell you. And it’s almost free healing, you just have to pay for the drinks! In this mode, you can also enchant your weapons if you got enough parts and skill in mechanics. How about a suppressor for your sniper rifle, or why not an extended barrel for your shotgun? It’s a fun thing to experiment with, which can make some weapons into legendary artifacts of murder and despair (for the guys on the other side of the barrel). It all works well, and on the harder difficulties, you will have to balance money and time very wisely, at least from the beginning to the midpoint of the game. Later on, money will flow pretty freely, since you don’t have too much to spend it on beyond hiring new mercenaries. See, there is no store in this version – it’s a much more live-of-the-land type of deal in
Jagged Alliance 3. I enjoy this, however, it does mean that money means very little in the later stages as there will be nothing to buy. It’s a missed opportunity, sadly, that in the end makes the struggle for survival non-existent outside of the combat.
A looker
The visuals are just splendid, filled with details while having a semi-realistic gritty style, instead of the typical cartoon style that is so popular nowadays (think
Fortnite). It got plenty of cool effects too, as your crew of mercenaries will get muddy when crawling around in the filth, and get bloody when wounded. The bodies also lie around on the battlefield where they died. It makes the battlefield come “alive”, especially when you take a look at the aftermath after a hard-won battle. Structures can also be destroyed with heavy enough force, like for example by firing RPG rockets into buildings. However, the destruction is not as advanced as
Silent Storm, yet, it looks great and adds enormous flavor to the combat considering it will remain in the state you left them in. One thing I highly miss is that the game does not have rag-doll effects for some baffling reason. I can live with only having animated deaths by bullets, but no rag doll for explosions? I miss it badly, and one of the reasons to blow up stuff is to see dudes flying across the map – loot be damned! Now they either just turn to meaty bloody chunks on the spot they died, or just play one of the canned animations. Very disappointing. Otherwise,
Jagged Alliance 3 is fantastic on the graphic front.
Sound, voice, and music are on the same level as the visuals. Top-notch in other words. One stand out is the soundtrack. It got plenty of good tracks to listen to, that play at random fitting intervals. Nothing reach the same heights as the
laptop track from
Jagged Alliance 2, but that song is legendary, so it would be almost impossible to top. I think the voice acting is good for the most part, it’s mostly the individuals behind some of the characters they represent that I can’t stand, as the mentioned Livewire merc. But there is nothing wrong with her delivery per se.
Good game
All in all, this is a good sequel to something many considers a very important and classic gaming memory from the past. There are issues of course since nothing is ever perfect, but this follow-up should be regarded as a success because it’s clear a lot of care went into this title to maintain most of the feeling from
Jagged Alliance 2. I should also add that the developers are making a real effort to support modding. While the modding tools have not yet been released, there are already mods out on the
Steam workshop. This is a good sign for the future. What also is good is that apparently, the game sold very well, which means that it will probably get expansions or DLCs in the future.
Jagged Alliance 3 is complete as it is, but extra missions or a new area to liberate would not be wrong. I highly recommend
Jagged Alliance 3, especially as someone who cares for the series. It’s a good sequel, worthy of any old fan or new player.
Thanks for reading.
