The general setup runs the same as Jagged Alliance 2: Queen Deidranna rules the country of Arulco with a ruthless iron fist, and you’re in charge of a mercenary group that has been hired by her ex-lover (and former President of Arulco) Enrico Chivaldori to take her out. You have to hire mercenaries and carefully command them in the field, while making sure they stay both well-equipped and alive. There’s missions to complete and areas to clear on the way, otherwise you have basically free run of Arulco as you hunt down your employer’s deceitful ex-wife. Women, eh?
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| Not sure how peering through a vent into a locked room allows me to see into the toilets on the other side of the building |
There’s a big shock for any fan of the series who hasn’t been following Back In Action’s development (surely at least one person reading this): it’s no longer turn-based, it’s real-time. Fortunately the shock is lessened with the knowledge that the player can go into a Tactical Screen by pressing Spacebar at any time, which pauses the action and allows them to issue complex orders. Expect to be seeing this screen a lot, at least every time you encounter an enemy.
As for the real-time strategyness, it doesn’t make as much of a difference as you’d expect. It makes the game a whole lot faster of course, with character movement across the map being the main beneficiary, but the second you get anywhere near an enemy soldier you better start planning your actions on the Tactics screen. This isn’t like any other RTS where you can just click on enemy units, blam blam blam, and either they’re dead or you are. You do that in Jagged Alliance, even when the odds are in your favour, and rest assured you will be the one dying.
JA:BIA is all about thinking tactically, and realistically. Pistols are terrible at long-range, but at extreme close range a machete’s more useful. A sniper rifle's useless if all the enemies are inside a building, but get one in front of a window and it suddenly becomes handy again. Most importantly: your mercs may have all the best armour and be armed to the teeth, but a girl in a bikini top with the most basic pistol can still kill you if you haven’t planned for it. And that’s what JA’s about really: planning, and then carrying out that plan.
The majority of the game is set in a zoomable/twistable isometric viewpoint, with the rest being over a general map of Arulco where you can quickly move your mercenary teams between locations. While you can’t see into buildings until you get a mercenary inside them (or, rather brilliantly, have them peek through a window or vent) you can see the locations of all enemy soldiers before you begin, so Back In Action’s already significantly easier than the original JA2. Which is in no way saying it’s actually easy now, of course.
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| What would a Jagged Alliance game be without kids working in a sweatshop? |
You start the game with only a limited amount of money, so you’ll probably be only hiring two mercenaries at the slightly confusing beginning. The particularly useful tutorial will teach you everything you need to know about how to play the game (when it doesn’t break that is, which it did for me on “select all units”), but not what to do on the menu screen. Upon clicking ‘Start New Game’ you’re given a huge static map, a smaller static map, and the demand that you hire mercenaries before you begin. You’ll eventually notice the tiny laptop in the corner of the screen, which you’ll press and be presented with a lot of meaningless information. You’ll undoubtedly just pick two random mercs (like I did) just to get on with the game, whereupon you’ll then be dumped on a map with no obvious objectives – well, until you go back into that laptop and check your emails.
Despite the pleasingly noob-friendly tutorial, Back In Action is definitely one of those titles that thinks that letting the player always know what they’re doing and giving them an easy time at the start are things that only wussy games do. I’m not an advocate of dumbing-down games, but a little hand-holding until players get their feet is nothing to be ashamed of. There’s a reason I’ve only played five minutes of X-Com, you know.
Luckily the objectives were quite simple: kill everyone with a red dot above their head and talk to anyone still standing. Accomplishing that seemingly simple task was harder than I’d imagined, however. Changing my guys’ stances, alternating between running and sneaking was the order of the day, with mapping enemy patrol routes, peeking through vents and identifying the weakest soldiers following up. Hiding in a building, I had one of my guys throw open the front doors as an enemy passed on the other side of the road, intending to quickly back him up and lure the soldier into a trap. They were lured all right, but my guys were the ones that got deaded.
This is mostly down to two reasons, and both for me are the biggest drawbacks so far in JA:BIA. The first is the simple, crazy point that if you order your men to shoot in the Tactical display they’ll only shoot one bullet at a time, rather than, say, until the person trying to kill them is dead. Yes, you can order a spray of gunfire with certain weapons, but if the enemy’s still standing after that? Eh, it’s okay, I’m sure they won’t take offence at being shot a few times… oh, I’m dead.
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| My guy’s the one in the back about to be shot. As usual |
Which links neatly to my second downer, and the thing I’m most worried about. You see, the AI is utterly awful. Enemies will get stuck on literally anything, including walls, doors, and each other, and upon hearing your mercs running around they will either root themselves in the ground or run like lambs to the slaughter. Not that your mercs are any better – 8 times out of 10 a gunfight will end in one or more of your guys being seriously injured or dying, even when they’ve massively got the upper-hand, because they literally have no brains of their own. They will gladly shoot at walls, stare down the axe-wielding psychopath running at them, or run around in circles when you’ve asked them to kindly get in position before the six machine-gunners come through the door.
Which is a bit of a problem. Normally I wouldn’t be so worried, but since the version number describes my copy as “Final” and it’s supposedly out in a few weeks I think I have reason to be concerned. Which is a shame, since otherwise Jagged Alliance: Back In Action is an extremely compelling and addictive strategy title. I just couldn’t quit until I’d cleared an area, and that occasionally took me hours. It’s entirely possible that developer Coreplay are working night and day to sort this AI issue out, and I really hope so. There’s a superb update of a classic game here, I’d hate to see it marred by a few guys running into a corner and spinning around for three hours.
Most Anticipated Feature/Element: Flexing the old-school tactical strategy muscles. Oh, and my guys not being utter morons.
