The evil Queen Deidranna and all your favorite mercenaries are back in action in Kalypso’s remake of Jagged Alliance 2—well, the vast majority of your favorite mercs at the very least. The story and characters are still largely the same, but in case you missed the highly praised 1999 turn-based shooter, here’s the setup for Jagged Alliance: Back in Action (JABIA). You are a successful military strategist contractor who is hired by the former ruler of the fictitious island nation of Arulco. You are tasked with taking back the country from his evil x-wife, Queen Deidranna, who enjoys abusing servants, being mean to babies, and is an all-around bad apple. By securing the island’s rich natural resources and hiring professional mercenaries, you will have the tools to overthrow the tyrannical dictator.
Although the Jagged Alliance series has roots in turn-based strategy games, this installment goes in a different direction with a real-time action focus which ends up playing similarly to Frozen Synapse. At any point during game-play, the player can quickly switch between a paused planning phase and a real-time execution phase. During planning, the player can queue up different commands for each merc and sync individual actions to occur simultaneously with another merc’s actions. This allows for coordination of attacks, whether stealthy or explosive, and can also help you plan out the rescue of pinned-down or incapacitated mercs.
However, even the most well thought out plan will have to be revised as commanders will be challenged to constantly reassess the battle as it unfolds. Since the game is not turn-based, the enemy will not wait for your mercs to execute your orders. This change definitely livens up the action but naturally eliminates the use of “action points” of the turn-based genre. Fans of the predecessor may find this objectionable, but I soon realized that since each command given to a merc takes a given amount of time to execute, this ends up playing similarly to the idea behind action points. Furthermore, the switch to a slightly more action-oriented style does not take away from strategy. Positioning is still key and a merc who suddenly finds himself in a bad spot is as good as incapacitated.
Fans will also immediately notice that the fog of war has been removed and understandably so. Although this may seem like a strong step away from strategy, the battle areas are much larger this time around and filled with greater numbers of enemies. This presents challenges of its own and would make hunting down that last enemy hidden in the fog a pain, let alone the thought of having your entire squad unwittingly approach a tight area packed with 20 guards.
If you have noticed by now that I have been saying “incapacitated” instead of “killed”,it’s because there are no instant deaths in this game. Whether your merc takes a stroll through a minefield or a sniper’s bullet to the face, he or she will always survive if only for a few seconds… long enough for a quickly responding medic to revive. Often times, it’s situations like these that create the most interesting moments. Your merc in jeopardy, although ignored by enemies while incapacitated, will die in seconds. Your medic will undoubtedly take fire when attempting to treat the wounded. How you use your remaining mercs is crucial–suppressive fireand smoke grenades are usually a decent idea.
If you are thinking that all of these changes make the game seem easy, it is only because you don’t understand how difficult the game would be otherwise. Even with these forgiving amendments, the game is unforgiving. Losing a merc in the early game is devastating and if that merc is your only medic, feel free to upgrade that to catastrophic. Learning that a crouched rifleman firing at a close-ranged enemy armed with an SMG is a battle you will lose every time will take multiple save point reloads to sink in.
Likewise, save point reloads will also teach you that a merc with 90 stealth points can easily knife an unsuspecting enemy from behind whereas a merc with 80 stealth may find himself bringing a knife to a gunfight. And this is coming from someone who was very reluctant to reload save points back in Jagged Alliance 2. Oh and did I fail to mention that you will forget to clear your original command queue before giving new orders when a situational change arises? Because you will. And your mercs will die because of it. Again and again.
Save point reloads aside, JABIA rewards the strategic player. Moving in on a guard post with a stealth team armed with silenced pistols and SMGs and successfully eliminating the sentries so that the rest of your mercs can enter a compound undetected is very satisfying, as is having a flanking merc land a grenade into a machine gun nest firing on your advancing forces. It’s situations like these that you will have a hard time finding in other games nowadays. Furthermore, with the switch to real-time action, assaulting buildings is actually fun now as opposed to the travesties that would occur in JA2.
Coordinating grenade and flash primers with an explosive wall breach and shotguns on point is fun you probably haven’t seen since the original Rainbow Six. Although the command queue timeline isn’t as precise as that of Frozen Synapse, it still works well in this game. In fact, with Guard Mode you can set your mercs to fend for themselves and engage approaching enemies at will which completely eliminates the tedium of commanding each and every fired shot of the smaller battles you are sure to win regardless.
JABIA’s biggest problem is that these situations don’t present themselves as often as one would hope, mostly due to a severely lacking ‘I’ in the enemy AI. It seems that if an enemy becomes aware of your presence, he or she will do any combination of three things: call for backup, run away, or attack. On multiple occasions, a failed attempt at a stealth approach would only result in a vigilant sentry guard calling for backup and then attacking with all his nearby comrades. Rather than employing any type of strategy, impressive or otherwise, the soldiers would simply run at my mercs whom were lying in wait. Assuming I had enough fire power, which I usually did, I would simply mow down the opposition and then move in on the now scarcely defended area.
Another staple of enemy behavior is to set up defensively in a locked room waiting in ambush. The problem is all it took was a noisy merc running by outside to have the enemy stare straight at a wall with backs turned to the only door to the room. If they weren’t doing this, they were making any brilliantly planned entry a moot effort by charging the door the moment I picked the lock. These things didn’t always happen, but the second time you see an enemy absorb a sniper shot to the chest and simply wait patiently for the inevitable follow-up shot is enough for you to realize there is sometimes a certain lack of strategy to this strategy game.
Between battles, you’ll be on the map screen planning your next area of attack or on the laptop browsing for new merc hires or weapon and equipment purchases. The map screen features a general overhaul; the static grids are gone along with assigning roles such as doctors or trainers/students. Instead, mercs heal gradually over time depending on how severely they were injured in battle and simply need to sit idly to build up their stamina. You still retain control over how your mercs progress, however, by assigning skill points as you see fit once they gain experience levels from killing, defusing mines, healing allies, using explosives, repairing weapons, and picking or breaking locks. You realists out there will be pleased to know you can now only repair weapons, whereas armor needs to be replaced as it wears down.
Since the ‘train militia’ job role is eliminated as well, you simply need to place a weapon in a willing civilian’s hands to have him or her fight for your cause. My favorite change to the map screen has to be the fact that most areas of interest provide some specified benefit. For example, securing the barracks will help upgrade your militia while silver mines yield the highest daily income. The map screen is also home to my greatest irritation, which is a bug (among a few) that will force almost half of your left clicks to cancel your last order given rather than select a new squad. Try ignoring that gem when you have 4 or 5 squads moving around on opposite ends of Arulco.
One aspect of the game which I was impressed to not have found an issue with is the line of sight for your mercs. You always have the option of firing at an enemy’s legs, torso, or head from either a prone, crouched, standing hip-fire, or standing aimed stance. Your merc will fire if he has line of sight to his target and won’t if there is a tree, railing, car, or any other obstacle in the way. Although you may at times find yourself wondering why a merc is giving you a verbal indication that he can’t fire, close inspection will inevitably yield that large sand mound you didn’t see initially. It doesn’t hurt that the sand mound isn’t ugly either, because, unlike many other strategy games, you will be spending a lot of time zooming the camera in close to view different angles. You aren’t going to be blown away by the visuals in JABIA, but the models and environments are still done quite well. Weapons, attachments, armor, and clothing all have their own models and skins which bring strategic advantage to wearing full camouflage or esthetic pleasure to raiding with business formal wear.
The weapon sounds aren’t pushing any envelopes, but they are all unique to each gun which will aid you in identifying the scary enemies from the not-so-scary enemies. The distinct sound effects of bullet ricochets will also clue you in on a merc that may be taking too much fire—suggesting maybe it’s time to get out of there. As far as the music goes, I have to admit I’ve actually spent the entire time playing with it muted and my Pandora playlist at full blast instead. This is not to say it’s bad, simply forgettable. It’s a strategy game; when’s the last time you listened to Starcraft music? Probably not the last time you played Starcraft. Merc scripted speech is repeated and overacted, but if you’ve played Jagged Alliance games before, you know that it’s all part of the slight silliness of each merc personality.
Once you get passed the bugs, which include the occasional crash to desktop and will hopefully be patched in the near future, and accept the AI for its flaws as we all know you’ve done time and time again for other games, JABIA provides an action-oriented strategy experience that is currently lacking in the market. Although perhaps not for the gamer who doesn’t want to exercise patience in his videogame experience, the strategy enthusiast will be pleased. You can catch Jagged Alliance: Back in Action at your local Steam store for $39.99 or if you’re still undecided you can try the demo.
