HomeFeatures
Jagged Alliance 3 desperately wants it to be 1999 again, and not in a good wayNot a good first impression
Not a good first impression
Image credit:THQ Nordic
Image credit:THQ Nordic
In the world of turn-basedstrategy games, it’s probably fair to say that we’ve been waiting a heck of a long time forJagged Allianceto make its next move. Almost a quarter of a century has passed since the last numbered entry in the series, and the many attempts that have been made to recapture its tactical, mercenary magic since then have beenmixedat best, andreviledat worst. Haemimont Games, the devs behind Tropico and current custodians of the upcomingJagged Alliance 3, know this, and their publisher THQ Nordic said as much back in September 2021 when it wasfirst revealed, assuring players they were going to create a game that “really does justice to the Jagged Alliance legacy”.
Jagged Alliance 3 | Legacy TrailerWatch on YouTube
Jagged Alliance 3 | Legacy Trailer
Of course, ifJagged Alliance 2is what you’ve been craving to revisit for the last 24-odd years, then I’m sure Jagged Alliance 3 will tick a lot of boxes for you. Alas, I’m now too engrained in the XCOM school of turn-based strategy games to feel much affection for that era anymore, and returning to that hazy, nebulous notion of not knowing if any of my shots are going to land in Jagged Alliance 3 feels like I’ve deliberately broken both of my arms and tied them behind my back somewhat.
The maddening thing is, Jagged Alliance 3 is more than happy to tell youeverything elseyou might want to know about landing a shot. It will tell you how much damage you’ll deal, its crit percentage, and with the ability to target individual body parts (split into the head, arm, torso, groin and foot), it will also tell you the exact damage modifiers you’ll receive if you successfully hit them - including whether specific body parts are protected with armour or hidden behind cover. It will happily offer up every little detail affecting a shot’s accuracy, such as whether your merc has a marksmanship bonus or you’ve spent extra action points to improve your aim, or if the enemy has a terrain advantage or is crouching or lying prone. These are represented as plus and minus marks, which is sort of useful, in that more pluses and minuses isprobablya good thing, but there’s stil no real clarity on what any of them actually mean, or how each point is weighted against the other. Things that, you know, would all be quite handily summarised with a single, cold, hard chance-to-hit percentage.
Jagged Alliance 3 throws a lot of information at you, but I rarely felt like I was making properly informed decisions about my next move in battle.
THQ Nordic have, admittedly, spoken about this before, telling cheery RPS fanzinePC Gamerthat “everything shifted” in the game’s development when they decided to remove that chance-to-hit number. Keeping it in made it feel too much like just another XCOM clone, they said, which is a fair cop, if I’m being honest. As much as I like the style and distinct flavours of other, more recent tactics games such asHard West 2,Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate - DaemonhuntersandMarvel’s Midnight Suns, that XCOM muscle memory does come back in full force every time I come to play them.
But when Jagged Alliance 3 practically bombards you with so much extraneous bumph, knowing how to parse the information it does choose to give you can be difficult. A headshot has a damage modifier of +80%, for example, but is that on top of the stated damage number up the top, or some other number such as hitting a guy’s torso? I couldn’t tell you. Similarly, spending action points to improve your aim is bafflingly presented as well. A circle around your target will narrow with each point spent, but short of an extra plus in your accuracy column, there’s no other indication whether spending one point is any better than two, three, or four.
Answers on a postcard for what the 20 means in the Range crosshair bar…
The same goes for the tiny range bar located between your remaining aim AP pool and the mouse prompt icon to tot them up. You’ll notice it has an upper extremity that’s simply marked ‘20’ for some reason, but its accompanying crosshair doesn’t move at all when you spend points to increase your aim. Could I also tell you why the crosshair would be inside or outside the little flashing portion of the bar that sometimes appears either side of it? Not on your life, mate, because not once does it take the time to explain what any of these things mean.
The defensive side of combat is thankfully easier to get to grips with. Half and full height cover are clearly marked on its grid-based map, and some low cover will only give you any benefit if you crouch or lie prone (and changing position will cost you one action point each time). Starting from crouched or prone will then cost you more action points to move from that position, but overwatch cones still tell you how much terrain is actually visible from your current position. If you’re lying flat on the floor, for example, you’re not going to be much use compared to your mate right next to you who’s simply crouched.
Hello overwatch, my old friend…
Still, when it came to planning my attacks, the lack of anything vaguely useful to inform any of my decisions meant that all I could really rely on in the endwasthat old XCOM muscle memory, and I’m not gonna lie, it was like being wrenched over a cheese grater before being strung up on a rusty old rack and pulled in all directions. The thing is, unless its tutorial and general UI gets some hefty improvements before launch, I suspect most people coming to Jagged Alliance 3 will end up feeling exactly the same way - after all, XCOM-likes are pretty much all we’ve been playing in the turn-based tactics space since Enemy Unknown first came out in 2012.
Outside of battle, the frustrations continued. When you’re not in combat, you move around its map squares in real-time, with enemies appearing gradually as they come into view. Again, maybe this is the muscle memory talking, but I wanted to approach these early, pre-battle moments like Desperados 3, getting my mercs into place without being seen, maybe taking one or two out stealthily before really getting into the meat of it. These light stealth elements are exactly what make Harebrained Scheme’supcoming Lamplighters League so exciting to me, for example, but Jagged Alliance 3 would almost always raise the alarm before I even knew I who or how I was spotted. Plus, regardless which merc actually triggered the eventual alarm, each group of enemies would always immediately know where everyone was hiding, rendering any kind of sneak attack or tactical pincer moves pretty much pointless.
Fox and Steroid probably had the worst zingers in my preview build, but gun fanatic Grizzly and marksman Ice were equal parts bad meathead / hoodlum parodies in their own right.
And oh god, the terrible merc barks. Such terrible, terrible merc barks. Not all characters were voiced in my preview build, but regardless of whether I was reading their dialogue on screen or having it slammed into my ear drums via its overly-ripe voice acting, they’re just embarrassingly juvenile at times and have no bearing on anything anyone says. And the NPCs just carry on talking at you like these walking talking stereotypes have said nothing at all, and the whole thing just makes you want to double over with a +80% cringe damage modifier.
It’s a shame, because other ideas Haemimont have brought forward from Jagged Alliance 2, such as certain mercs hating other mercs on your team and wanting more money to compensate for the psychic damage they’ll receive, or being overly enthusiastic and getting morale boosts when they find out their best mate’s going to be fighting with them, is actually pretty sound and something I’d like to see more of in strategy games. But when you get the sense that nearly three quarters of them have probably been cancelled in a previous life and have opted for mercenary work because it’s the only thing they’ve got going for them, none of them are terribly enjoyable hangs.
The dynamic campaign map is, at least, a rare highlight in this otherwise worrying sea of early disappointment. Battle arenas each correspond to a grid reference on the top-down overworld map, and you’ll need to navigate and exit them at the correct compass points to get to your next destination. You can also call in more mercs provided you’ve got enough funds to keep them employed for the length of their contract, but those additional squads will take time to arrive and catch up to other teams in the field if you need reinforcements.
Time is money in Jagged Alliance 3, so you’ll need to weigh up the cost of bringing more mercs in and taking the time to heal and repair equipment with each merc’s expiring contract deadlines.
