HomeReviewsJagged Alliance 3
Jagged Alliance 3 review: a strong sequel that aims to refresh, not merely repeatA.I.M. is in the reach zone
A.I.M. is in the reach zone
Image credit:THQ Nordic
Image credit:THQ Nordic
I’m definitely going to keep playingJagged Alliance 3. However much I waver back and forth on my exact feelings about it, this is crucial. As with its ancestors, you’re invading a fictional country with a team of dysfunctional freelance mercenaries, managing their equipment and clashing personalities through a guerrilla war on an open world map whose every sector can host turn-based battles.
Jagged Alliance 3 - Feature TrailerWatch on YouTube
Jagged Alliance 3 - Feature Trailer
The characters are… well. Mechanically, they’re great. There are no classes, and everyone’s skills vary wildly, but since they improve through use you can shape people as you see fit. They each get a unique ability, adding a little character without pigeonholing them. They have personality too, or rather, they get one thing, which they’ll tell you about constantly. Buns is efficient. Meltdown is now an insufferable tryhard. Ice is a Black American Guy, like on TV.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / THQ Nordic
I don’t care about the plot and can recall the name of exactly one NPC. Its setting doesn’t sit entirely comfortably, not least as your employer is a diamond mining corporation. It’s pretty clear they’re not the goodies and something will probably come of that, but so far, I’m really only in a fictional African country to shoot dudes for money, which is ground thatFar Cry 2covered less uncomfortably in 2008. I didn’t detect any malicious or edgelord vibes, and a game about mercenary guerrillas will naturally visit luckless, war-torn countries. But it’s at best quite boring to see Africa again reduced to shanty towns, warlords, and shamans, and the writing just doesn’t carry off the tongue-in-cheek personality that could lift it out of that mire.
There are, to its credit, loads of side jobs and hidden things, and its map is impressively open. Sectors are smaller but more interesting than before, with fewer empty jungles to trudge through, and many maps taking full advantage of the 3D engine with multiple elevations. There are couriers to ambush now, but these suffer from that perennial turn-based shooter problem: stealth.
All travel happens in real time until someone kicks off, and we switch to turns. Before that, you can sneak around and stealth kill sentries. Enemies who spot you do theutterly bullshit"free turn to run to cover thing" like in XCOM, so you’ll want to set up ambushes. But you have to do that in real time, slowly controlling everyone in turn even as the enemy walk out of the killzone. The “prepare takedown” option helps, but not much.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / THQ Nordic
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / THQ Nordic
I think it’s a success. It’s a strong push to move the genre beyond the model we’ve been stagnating in for years that still acknowledges the strengths of that design (so far that it copies some things I wish it wouldn’t, like the godawful panic system). It will be divisive for that, and may alienate the most obdurate of the purists too, neither of which it really deserves. Tonally, it’s mostly a miss, and aspects of its UI like travel, merc selection, transferring, and splitting inventory need another quality-of-life pass. But the combat / strategy / management elements are enough to carry it through those disappointments, and I suspect to keep me coming back for quite some time.
