Jagged Alliance

Last month, we talked about X-Com: UFO Defense, known to many as the quintessential turn-based tactical squad combat game. There is one other game in this category that has its partisans: the Jagged Alliance series, encompassing Jagged Alliance, Jagged Alliance 2, and a number of expansion packs and mods for the latter game.

The premise of all the games in the series is simple: you are a mercenary who has been hired to recapture a small island somewhere in Latin America. You must choose and outfit a small team of mercenaries, take over the island sector by sector, train militia to hold territory, and create a functioning economy to ensure that you can keep your troops employed and supplied.

There are a number of differences between JA and X-Com. The strategic situation at the game’s start is much more grim. You have very limited means, and a fairly small pool of soldiers to recruit from. Death is not cheap in Jagged Alliance. Losing a soldier is a real tragedy, and is enough to make you (or, at least, me) reload a saved game. Adding to this is that each mercenary has his or her own personality, offering their own comments on the situation, and losing a team member can be frustrating. I’ll always miss Ivan Dolvich, and the way he’d say “Khorosho, khorosho!” when I sent him somewhere. This clever leveraging of racial stereotypes – that somehow, miraculously, manages to not become offensive – may be one reason that Jagged Alliance is allegedly being developed into a film property.

The strategy of assembling a competent (and cost-effective) team is one of the more interesting parts of the game. Mercenaries have different skills and abilities. In addition to their physical traits, they can be more or less competent at marksmanship, explosives, medicine, mechanics, or leadership. There are mercs available who excel in everything, but you can’t afford them. Creating an adequate team, then, is a question of tradeoffs. There’s this guy who’s really good with explosives, but it turns out he’s a psycho and a pyromaniac.

While there’s some science-fiction in the game, most of it is fairly gritty and realistic. You won’t be lugging around plasma rifles or laser pistols here, but .45s, .38s, and 9mm submachine guns. While this is exciting in its own right, it also means that, overall, Jagged Alliance has a less unique style than X-Com.

The UI in the game is a bit schizophrenic. When there are no enemies about, movement is real-time. You can move everyone in your team at once, and time passes if you do nothing. Whenever enemies are spotted, the game shifts into a turn-based mode where one character moves at a time. As in X-Com, a character with leftover movement points may be given the opportunity to “interrupt” enemy movement, so caution is the watchword.

The enemy AI is quite good. Enemy soldiers tend to travel together, providing supporting fire, seek cover, and try to outflank you. Rushing them head-on will almost always result in failure, even if you have bigger guns. Yet despite this focus on realism – or perhaps because of it – sometimes Jagged Alliance feels less like a game, and more like a job. The moments of triumph are all too sparse, and the effort to reach them is all too great.

Jagged Alliance runs under DOSBox, and is available in remainders bins for not too much money. Jagged Alliance 2 is still being sold by a number of different vendors, and runs well on Windows. Jagged Alliance 2 Gold is available on Gametap.