Jagged Alliance: Back In Action Review

It’s a rare occasion to see one of your favorite old gaming series get brought back to life. After many years of waiting you are bound to build a lot of hype over something you used to enjoy a lot way back when.  Jagged Alliance is one of those series for me. I still remember struggling and loving my way through the first game of the series back in the 90’s. It was one of the very first games I ever bought with my own money. I still go back and play it every now and then even now when I get the itches for some nostalgia action.

The original Jagged Alliance had a purely turn based combat system. You would hire your mercenary team, move from one sector to the other killing bad guys and getting better weapons until you made it to the big bad man and put a bullet in his hairline (without going into greater detail).

Next release of the series was Jagged Alliance:  Deadly Games which was pretty much an expansion to the original, though it was in fact a stand-alone game with a few new features and guns and bling. After Deadly Games it was time for Jagged Alliance 2 which changed the looks and gameplay a lot, adding the possibility to get on roofs and prone for example. The combat had changed to be turn based only when an enemy was visible, which was nice considering how time consuming and tedious travelling around with nothing to do can be in turn based mode.  Jagged Alliance: Back in Action is a remake of Jagged Alliance 2. Needless to say I had my hopes up way high for it.

Firing the game up you are welcomed with an intro cinematic that sadly looks like it was made about ten years ago. The feeling of lurking disappointment fills your head as you think “is this really the best they could make after over ten years”? Then again, Jagged Alliance was always more about the gameplay itself than the graphics, so we’ll let this slide. The clip shows you what kind of nasty shit is going down at Arulco as well as the moment you are recruited to solve the problem.  Main menu, New Game, LET’S GO!

You are a… I’m not really sure to be honest! I guess you could take it as an organizer of sorts. You have been hired to assemble a team of mercenaries to free the island of Arulco from the evil grasp of a mean old hag named Deidranna. You are provided a laptop with access to A.I.M. (The Association of International Mercenaries) which is your main source for hiring the right people for the job. You start up with a limited amount of money, so you’ll have to make the choice between hiring many bad and cheap mercenaries and one or two good ones. You will earn more money as the game progresses, but we’ll get to that later.

The list of mercenaries available on A.I.M. Most of which have been there since the beginning of the series.

The mercenaries have skills that vary from 0 to 100. These skills pretty much determine what the merc can and can’t do. For example to disarm and arm mines you’ll need a high explosives skill. These skills can be upgraded when your mercenaries level up. You get experience from pretty much everything you do. You are able to hire six mercs per squad and I’m not sure how many squads you can have (only had four at max during my playthrough). You are also able to view some emails and other background related info on your laptop if you so wish. If not, it’s time to shoot some nuts!

The first thing that I notice is how all the enemies are visible, all the time. In the previous games in the series you would only see an enemy if one of your mercenaries saw him. Also the combat is not turn based at all, everything happens in real time. You have the ability to enter a tactical screen where the game pauses and you can assign a chain of commands to each mercenary should you wish to do so. Pretty neat!

Tactical point of view. The place where you pimp up your movements.

You can shoot the enemy in the head, torso or the legs. The chance of the shot succeeding in shown as you aim. Depending on your distance and skill the shot will be either Unlikely to Hit, Likely to Hit, Very Likely to Hit, Certain to hit or Impossible to Hit, if the target is out of the line of sight. There are also melee weapons in the game which you can use to poke the nasty men till they die. All of the combat, moving around and stuff is controlled with the mouse. Killing enemies will alert the other enemies on the sector if they see or hear you blow their fellow badasses up.

And that’s the game! You move from one city/location of interest to another on the world map liberating each of them until you make your way to the mean bitch mentioned at the beginning of this review. Each location has a number on the map, which shows how many enemies there are in that current location and what level they are. Enemy levels vary from one to five. After liberating each location you can give the local civilians weapons and armor to make them defend that place in your absence. The militia you “hire” can also be trained up to level five. And yes, the enemy will attack the locations in order to get them back. Militia just provides a way to solve these attacks without having to travel back and forth for all eternity. Also freeing cities and especially mines will be your main source of income. The more shit you set free the more money you get. There are also quests in the game which will in most cases give you money once you complete them.

The quest list near the end of the game.

As I mentioned earlier I’m a big fan of this series. This is the reason why I will be spending the rest of the review finding new ways to enter the rectum of this game through places that are not meant for it. Out of all the new features most seem to be shitty and ruin the game mechanics that were so dear to me.

Where to even begin.. 

The controls of the game are pretty bad. You have to twist and turn the camera angle a lot just to be able to see where can and can’t go. Moving inside buildings is a pain in the ass as there is no logic to when the roof will or won’t disappear to let you see to each room. Worst case scenario you’ll have to twist the camera angle to see slightly inside a room from its doorway and move the merc to the doorway which will finally reveal the contents of the room for you. Doesn’t sound like too big a deal but the mercenaries movement is already very clumsy to begin with and shit like this just makes the rage pop up nothing else. Doing anything sudden and precise is up to a stroke of luck each time you try it.

One does not simply walk to the corner. This is the straightest route available.

There is no quick save or restore in the game which is really frustrating considering all the broken shit in the game that makes you want to reload. A LOT. There are also hot keys in the game which are assigned to the weirdest places. And naturally there is no way to reassign them. Who would want to customize hot keys anyways!

The line of sight and aiming is ridiculous as well. Probably due to bugs the enemy can every now and then see you through walls or behind corners as well as shoot at you. Funny enough you won’t even see the enemy in these situations. Even out in the wild the enemy might be able to see and shoot you through a rock or a tree while your guy just complains about not being able to return fire.

There is no logic to how likely you are to hit the enemy. I’ve even had “Certain to hit” shots miss…ten times in a row. Then again unlikely to hit shot to the head will probably hit in a few tries. Aiming through windows and doorways is messed up. You will most likely miss every time unless you are angled and positioned perfectly, even if your probability to hit says otherwise.

The enemy can and will see you from the most ridiculous places no matter how dark it is or how covered you are.  Even if you have a guy hiding in some bushes at the complete opposite direction from the enemy from where you shoot at them, they will immediately spot the hiding silent guy on contact. Also sneaking up on enemies is again just a matter of luck. Usually as you’re about to get close for a quick stab kill the enemy, who has been stationary for the past hour, suddenly decides to turn around and go for a walk. He will see you, kill you, alert everyone else and kill the rest of your gang. Such a silly coincidence. Every. Single. Time.

You can’t shoot through bushes, throw granades to roofs or change the angle of the throw in general or shoot anyone from hand to hand distance. REALLY! If a guy runs to you with a knife before you are able to make a shot at him your merc will stand up, put his gun away and pull out some stick to fend the nasty man off with. By this time you are already dead, simply because shooting from point blank range is a no go.

The bush is mightier than the bullet.

They also removed many of the tactical mechanics from the game in comparison to Jagged Alliance 2. You can only blow up walls at given points, you can’t cut through wire fences and you can’t even hop over a fucking bag of sand. The movement around each location is so limited it’s not even funny. Where in JA2 you could sneak your way in to a heavily guarded Sam site, in this one you’ll just have to go through the front gate. It took about half an hour on each city to find a way to start shooting down enemies without alerting every single asshole in the location.

The enemy sends out forces to take back the places you have freed far too frequently. There is not enough militia and equipment in most locations to keep them at bay. Unless you buy rifles to all the militia at any given location and train them up to the maximum level, they will be wiped out in a few raids. You just don’t get enough money to do that to each city you free. So running around recapturing the cities becomes an annoying necessity.

You could stay at a location and wait for the enemy to invade. However you can’t position your guys if you do so. Time only passes on the world map and when you enter the world map all of your guys will be grouped up in a single lump whenever you re-enter the location. So taking defensive positions will be reset no matter what you do.

There are many more minor things to complain about but review is getting long enough already as is. Oddly enough I still like this game even with all the annoying flaws it has. Why? Probably cause of the weird nostalgia value it has for me. Even though the game wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do 90% of the time, those other 10% still felt very satisfying. I’m really disappointed that they got rid of the turn based combat. It seems moving to real time has made the game prefer a more reckless approach to everything instead of rewarding the nice little strategies you might come up with.

Would I recommend you get this game? Fuck no! Unless you are a fan of the series like I am you will probably regret getting this game. You’d be better off playing Jagged Alliance 2, which is a game I CAN recommend for everyone to get. This remake does it no justice. Taking your own new approach to a game is not always the best thing to do. Why try to improve something that was already working so well at the expense of destroying the whole core of the mechanics that made the game so good in the first place. I am disappoint.