![]() It’s the foundation myth of the United States and a favorite pop-cultural trope. In 1999, it was easy to play tactical dress-up with a classic underdog story of insurgents slowly growing in training and capacity as they bled a superior military power to death. Making matters worse, some of them carry sniper rifles and night-vision equipment, meaning that the kind of night battles that gave you an early-game advantage suddenly become impossible until you get specialized night-fighting gear (which, again, you’ll probably have to take off their dead bodies). These royal guard units quickly begin retaking territory you’ve seized, and unless you can win a couple battles against them and loot their gear, you probably won’t have anywhere near the firepower to stop them. ![]() You go from fighting second-rate gunmen wearing literal redshirts and carrying handguns to battling black-clad elites sporting first-rate military equipment and full body-armor that outclasses most of the weapons your soldiers carry. After some relatively straightforward opening moves where you secure a couple towns, an airfield where you can get supplies shipped-in, and a silver mine or two, the regime hits back with the force of a sledgehammer.įollowing a cutscene of the evil queen Deidranna sending in her elite troops, all hell breaks loose. I had one campaign derailed because of a “ DON’T EMAIL MY WIFE” meltdown that caused a couple of my best, most experienced troops to quit the campaign at the exact moment I needed all-hands-on-deck.īut what the game does really brilliantly is capture the slow, uneven escalation of a small local rebellion into a bitter guerilla war and finally into a full-fledged clash between elite conventional armies. Your character are almost universally meatheads who wouldn’t have been out of place in Predator or Aliens, and they’ll develop weird personality clashes or synergies that make squad chemistry an ever-shifting variable. It’s a game for people who dreamed of living the improbable adventures they read about in Frederick Forsyth books and Soldier of Fortune magazine, made by people who thought all of that was hilariously asinine. In his book about JA2, writer, developer, and super-fan Darius Kazemi gets into the strange combination of gun fetishism and goofy comedy the typifies the game. I’ll be the first to concede that the whole vibe of the game is weird. It’s a lemonade-stand business sim, but for paramilitary violence. You see, after the opening of the game, you have to pay your staff, hire additional mercenaries to increase your numbers, and place mail-orders for 7.62mm ammo, kevlar vests, and hand grenades. There are small towns and a couple relatively large cities and, most importantly, there are mines that you can take over to fund your ongoing war effort. Each sector is a specific tactical map where combat can occur. You recruit a band of misfit, amateurish mercenaries, then begin waging a guerilla war across a huge map of the entire country. Jagged Alliance 2 puts you in charge of a mercenary company tasked with overthrowing a violent dictatorship in the fictional country of Arulco. It’s not a perfect comparison, but it’s a bit like what you might get if XCOM were crossed with a Total War campaign. Rather, Jagged Alliance 2 was a game whose ambition lay in melding tactical combat with an unforgiving strategic layer context. Yet it’d be a mistake to think it was behind the times. It might be from 1999, when 3D graphics were transforming what video games looked like and how many of them felt to play, but JA2’s sprites, forced isometric perspective, and most of all its incredibly fussy and detailed RPG interface mark it as a game of very old-school sensibilities. ![]() Jagged Alliance 2 is recognizably a relative and peer of games like Fallout 2. ![]()
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