14 DAY TRIAL // 
Jagged Alliance 2 is one of those video games that marked my childhood and dominated many nights and days, occupying the hours after work and almost all weekends when I did not read and when my parents did not force me to go outside.
The title managed to create a very deep tactical experience which also integrated role-playing elements, allowing players to take charge of a small band of mercenaries, each with a lot of personality and very clear skills, as they tried to get rid of the dictator of an island nation.
Jagged Alliance 2 features complex battles, plenty of weapons and armor to choose from, a cheesy story, and graphics that are now incredibly outdated but were solid for the time when it launched, in 1999.
Sir-Tech created a great classic game and the development team managed to appeal to the fan base, which is pretty dedicated, in order to fund a Kickstarter campaign for a modern update on the same core ideas, called Jagged Alliance: Flashback.
The game has now been launched and it does manage to offer an experience that is similar to what fans remember, although it does not have the quality and the small details that would make it a solid spiritual successor.
Flashback can be a good game at times, but most of the time it only serves as a reminder of what the series had to offer in the past rather than what it can become in the future.
Jagged Alliance would really benefit from being picked up by a bigger company, which has the resources to remake it for modern gamers in a manner similar to how Firaxis reworked XCOM and made it a critical and commercial success.
Story
Jagged Alliance: Flashback does not change anything when it comes to the basic setup for the single-player campaign, with gamers having to travel to a fictional Caribbean island which is dominated by a dictator in order to take charge of a small band of rebels and restore democracy and respect for human life.
The location is called San Hermanos and the developers at Full Control do introduce a number of new enemies, although they lack interesting personalities and they serve mostly as quest givers, occasionally doling out items and other rewards.
The biggest loss when it comes to the narrative is the interactions between the mercenaries themselves, which were always a highlight.
Now the team moves mostly in silence and no one seems to have a clear personality, which eliminates the joy of role playing in order to try and use each character based on his personality in addition to his skills.
Gameplay
Jagged Alliance: Flashback is a turn-based third-person action title focused on squad mechanics and management which allows gamers to choose which characters they want to take into battle and how they prefer to approach each situation.
Initially, weapons are rather weak and characters cannot take too many hits without bleeding out, but once some good revenue streams are secured and a good squad is assembled, the difficulty drops a little and the combat situations become enjoyable.
Having a good mix of specialization and skills is essential, with at least two marksmen required and a doctor almost worth his weight in gold.
The new Jagged Alliance also asks players to approach each situation with care, moving only from cover to cover and trying to minimize the moments when a character can be attacked from more than one direction.
Jagged Alliance: Flashback does have a pretty solid Artificial Intelligence powering the forces of the dictator of San Hermanos, and there are tiers included, which means that the game gets harder the farther players progress.
Enemies know how to deploy flanking maneuvers and when to simply move back in order to try and get the player to move out of cover in pursuit.
At the same time, the computer sometimes charges ahead recklessly, which means that almost every battle feels unpredictable and tense.
The biggest problem with the combat system is the way it deals with short range combat, where even classic pistols do not have a hit chance close to 100 percent when an enemy is just one square away from my party.
Misses are part of every tactical experience but it is unclear why they exist at point-blank range.
Some regions allow players to recruit militia in order to stop counterattacks, and there are moments when healing and weapon repair will become the main concern of a squad.
Unfortunately, outside of combat, Jagged Alliance: Flashback feels a little empty and I missed both the gun store featured in the classic game and the way items could be customized with a lot of attachments that could improve their performance in combat.
Full Control has also failed to create interesting locations and there are times when the game almost forces gamers to do battle in open space, with very limited options for cover, and those moments tend to end with dead mercs and a lot of regret.
Graphics and audio
Jagged Alliance: Flashback is not a great looking game, and at times, it’s infuriating that the development team has not managed to find a better way to use its limited resources to create another art style that would make the game more palatable.
Basically, Full Control has chosen to use a slightly cartoonish filter on the entire world and the characters in order to hide the fact that they lack detail and have limited animations, but the move only serves to highlight the fact that in many ways Jagged Alliance 2 is better looking.
It would have probably been a better idea to make the experience even more stylized, even if the player base would not accept such a move easily, and to try to give it more personality because as it stands now there’s no reason to create a connection with the game.
Jagged Alliance: Flashback also has poor voice acting and there’s limited dialog in the game.
The sounds of battle are a little better simulated and the soundtrack is mostly OK, although once more, it fails to add anything to the atmosphere.
The Good
- Combat system
The Bad
- Limited story
- No personality
- Limited graphics appeal
Conclusion
Full Control has managed to put together a mostly solid combat engine, which can deliver entertaining firefights under some conditions, but the rest of the experience has been neglected and does not create an interesting setting for the adventure.
Since Jagged Alliance: Flashback was launched, the developers have delivered some updates in order to eliminate issues that the community has been reporting and at the moment the title is much more stable and runs more smoothly.
At the same time, the studio has been saying that long-term support is heavily linked to sales and that, as long as enough gamers like the experience enough to pay for it, they do have plans to expand the mechanics with a range of new content.
Jagged Alliance: Flashback, in its current state, can appeal to hardcore fans of the classic who might be interested to see how it might be re-created using more modern tech, but I believe that most gamers are better served by getting a cheap version of Jagged Alliance 2 and by hunting down the community-made patches for it.
