![]() We now have a 3D world, but to say that it looks good would be too much. Have we somehow lost videogame voiceover technology over the past 20 years? Honestly, the original mercs back in 1995 had larger vocabularies, and a heck of a lot more personality. Given that the music is looped and forgettable too, you won’t miss a thing playing in silence. I took to muting the sound after a while. Trust me, you will go crazy having to hear Vicki say, “I was born ready!” in her completely fake Jamaican accent 50 or 60 times on each level. Your mercs only say one or two phrases every time you select them. Probably highlighted by the fact that you only have two mercenaries, the sound is so very annoyingly repetitive that its best described as grating. I have to bring up the poor sound quality at this point too. You just get your two characters and have to make them work throughout Rage. Gone are the painstaking resource management decisions you had to make in the original game, trying to bargain and hire the best mercs from AIM. ![]() This extremely stripped down roster was the first indication that Rage would be a poor substitute for the original. You will battle alongside these two throughout the game. The island where Jagged Alliance: Rage takes place.Īt the start of Rage, you are given a choice of two mercenaries from a pool of six. Jagged Alliance: Rage! is not a terrible game, but it’s simply not worthy of the JA name. So it looks like the curse of Jagged Alliance sequels will not be broken. Sadly, they fell quite a bit short of that goal. Their developer write up talks about how they are trying to make a title with the core elements that made the original so beloved. I do appreciate what Handy Games is trying to do with the series. All the mercenaries have personal problems now too, like poor health or substance abuse issues. Rage is set 20 years after the original, and features a few of the mercenaries from the original game, including fan favorites like Grunty and Ivan. If you remember, the original was actually kind of funny with some of the characters like Mary Beth Wilkens, the housewife turned mercenary killer and Tex R. Developed by Handy Games and published by THQ Nordic, the game attempts to put a little bit of a comedic spin on the original game. Now we have Jagged Alliance: Rage! coming into the picture, the latest of the officially made titles. Jagged Alliance: Rage! bridge battlefield. Sometimes these off-brand titles turned out better than the official ones, but nothing came close to the majesty of the original. Others were made unofficially, but tried to sneak the name into the title, like Brigade E5: New Jagged Union back in 2006. Some of them were official and made with the JA license like Jagged Alliance: Back In Action from 2012, but still failed miserably. ![]() Since those days, there have been many attempts to remake the series. In both cases, the original games presented players with a tight story where you really cared about what happened to the people you were trying to save, and about your mercenaries. When Jagged Alliance 2 came out some years later, they added those advanced features into the game, which took some getting used to, but again set the standard that most turn-based-strategy titles follow today. There were no height or elevation considerations, just cover and line of sight. Your 2D world is ready to conquer!Īmazingly, Jagged Alliance took place on a totally 2D world. Nothing was more thrilling than to hear “A chunk of steel,” when you know you could turn that into a barrel extension or even a silencer. There was even a narrator who would explain what you have found. ![]() This was complimented by a lot of good voice acting, with each mercenary having quite a few phrases they could say, at a time in computer gaming when that was actually a pretty big deal. Others would react poorly when exposed to certain stimuli, and might even panic. Some hated each other and would not work together, or might even try to murder each other. All of the mercenaries you could hire had actual personalities for one. The original Jagged Alliance game in all it’s 1995-era glory.īeyond good strategic gameplay, the original Jagged Alliance had quite a bit of charm and new features that most players hadn’t experienced before. Developers have tried to recapture the success of Jagged Alliance over the years, but mostly failed in those efforts. It was many people’s first exposure to turn-based combat games (although UFO: Enemy Unknown came out a year before), and paved the way for other beloved series to follow. ![]() The first game in the series was developed by Madlab Software and published by Sir-Tech Software back in the DOS days of 1995. I don’t think any game series has so enthralled players while at the same time vexing game developers as Jagged Alliance. ![]()
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