I finally got around to playing Jagged Alliance 3, which is currently available for the PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and on PC. I was pleasantly surprised at just how good this game was. It contained a lot of everything that I enjoyed when it comes to turn-based games, and managed to improve on some things I felt the turn-based genre lacked, but also contained some things that I felt could have been done better. Nevertheless, I decided to put together a quick rundown of what it did good and what it did bad, and how I felt about it and maybe you can chime in with your own opinions as well.
Good: Female Characters
The female characters are actually feminine in this, despite being rough-and-tumble mercenaries. I was pleasantly surprised at this because in western media women have been portrayed as excessively masculine in almost all regard when it comes to anything adventure or action oriented. So imagine my surprise when so many of the women in Jagged Alliance 3 still retaining their femininity. You could tell that Haemimont paid very close attention to how the characters were portrayed in Jagged Alliance 1 and Jagged Alliance 2 and made sure they were consistent with that for the third game, and so it was a huge breath of fresh air.
Majority of the female mercenaries are married or quite fond of their male peers, which was another huge shock to me because in so many games made by western developers they make the female characters nonchalant, dispassionate, or outright hostile to their male peers. It’s exhaustive how much the gender wars has pervaded so much of media and tainted it, and here, it was such a nice touch that the female characters were fond of their male counterparts, especially Fox and Kalyna.
It was also very warming how Raven and Raider had such great camaraderie as a married couple. They compliment one another and work really well together. Even the very butch Meltdown still has some redeeming qualities and pairs nicely with a few other male mercs where they have some good banter with one another. All this without being misandrist or exercising any kind of overt feminist talking points.
Mouse is the only female character who might fit into the mold of a typical western female character, as she supposedly was in a relationship with another female character, Stella, but it’s left ambiguous and they veer away from that as much as possible. Though the deal with Stella was something that was established way back in Jagged Alliance 1, so that wasn’t something Haemimont Games wrote for the characters in Jagged Alliance 3, thankfully.
Good: Male Characters
Even though the female characters are well done in Jagged Alliance 3, and it could have gone horribly wrong in so many different ways, it’s just as easy for the male characters to go wrong as well. In many western titles the male characters are either effeminate, dolts, useless, or villains, or a combination of all of the above. Here, Haemimont kept all of the characters just as they were in previous titles, along with a few surprises, especially regarding the mercenaries from the second-rate M.E.R.C., outfit.
But it’s a real breath of fresh air having a bunch of quirky, unique, badass, and masculine male characters here. My absolute favorite was the fresh hunter Flay. This guy made me miss the days of having lead heroes like this in video games and media… he’s like a mix of a French version of Crocodile Dundee and the High Plains Drifter. Absolutely badass.
Others like Reaper and Blood makes you feel invincible. I love Reaper’s little sayings and existential phrases that really live up to his nickname. Plus, he’s dressed impeccable.
Jagged Alliance 3 basically just reminded me of how horrible today’s games are and how absolutely emasculated many of today’s lead males are. The unapologetic masculinity that many of the male characters exude really lured me into the experience and their characterization helped make the combat and the missions feel so much more immersive. It reminded me of just how important good characters are to the story and the gameplay and making players feel compelled to keep playing, and Haemimont did a fantastic job of bringing those male characters to life to make the game and the missions feel worth playing.
Good: Only Two Genders
It may not be a big thing to some people, but in an era where the binary nature of the human species is being erased in modern media, it’s always a treat when a game makes sure that there are no qualms or confusion about who or what you’re playing, and I like that they do not indulge in any of the rainbow nonsense in Jagged Alliance 3. You can choose a male or a female when creating a character and they avoid the whole “Body Type 1” and “Body Type 2” nonsense that so many other games have indulged in as a way to avoid facing the reality that humans are biologically defined as either male or female.
Good: Merc Selection
In addition to portraying the male characters and female characters with a lot of personality and appropriately designating them to roles that are both fun and believable, there is a really good selection of different mercenaries available in Jagged Alliance 3, with plenty of returning faces and a few new ones. The M.E.R.C., crew are no longer hirable from the 1999-tier website layout, but they are interspersed throughout the campaign as they all play a pretty important role in the main storyline, which I thought was pretty cool.
But ultimately most of the mercs are believable in their role, and even the ones that seem like they are out in left field can even grow on you. There is someone in there for every type of tactical turn-based player, which I really appreciate. Plus, if there is a merc that you take al iking to and want them for a role that they don’t specialize in, you can still train them up over the course of the game or have them keep using the trait that you want them to become competent in. That adds to the role-playing aspects and gives the game an nice bit of character and gameplay diversity when it comes to how you play and who you play with.
Good: Multiple Story Paths
In addition to having a nice cache of different mercs to play as, the game has an abundance of ways to complete different story paths. You can side with different factions, kill certain characters, recruit certain characters, choose evil paths, choose good paths, or not take sides at all. There are a plethora of different side missions in addition to the main story beats that you will receive a narrative slide for at the end of the game, very much like Marvel Ultimate: Alliance, where depending on your choices would determine what sort of ending outcomes you would receive.
If you decide to do all of the main story quests and the side-quests, you’re looking at the very least of 100 hours, which is quite lengthy. Much of that time will be spent in combat, but there is still a lot of meaty gameplay to be had and plenty of other discoverable stories you can partake in as well by simply exploring each sector.
Given the different endings and different side-quest outcomes, much like Jagged Alliance 2 you will definitely want to replay the game and try different missions to get different outcomes. And since Haemimont made it where Jagged Alliance 3 is compatible with the Steam Workshop, you’re also highly encouraged to replay the game with mods and really mix up your gameplay experience, which adds tons of replayability to the game. Jagged Alliance 2 is one of my most replayed games ever, and I can easily see myself getting that itch to replay Jagged Alliance 3 in a number of different ways just to recruit different mercs, change different story outcomes, and see how it all plays out.
Plus, they still have some of the sci-fi missions, but they’re way more grounded here in Jagged Alliance 3 than in Jagged Alliance 2. The alien bugs in Jagged Alliance 2 with the bug queen seemed like it came right out of StarCraft. Jagged Alliance 3 keeps things a lot more believable within its universe, even though German super soldiers is still kind of far fetched, it actually makes a lot of sense within the context of the story, as well as the periodic appearance of zombies, which also ties into Grand Chien’s culture and the super-soldier sub-plot.
A lot of games today just aren’t made to be replayable, either due to insufferable main characters, terrible story, or poor gameplay. But Jagged Alliance 3 has great characters, a good story, and excellent gameplay, so that makes it well worth replaying.
Good: Weapon Selection
Jagged Alliance 2 had a smorgasbord of weapons to choose from. Just a mammoth collection of small arms, explosives, and automatic weapons. Just about every type of gun you could want to use, Jagged Alliance 2 and Jagged Alliance 2: Unfinished Business let you use them. Many of the weapons were from popular action films from the 1980s and 1990s, so chances were that if you just got done watching an Arnold, Stallone, Bruce Willis, Van Damme, Steven Seagal, or Chuck Norris film, the guns they used most in their films were likely featured in Jagged Alliance 2.
While Jagged Alliance 3 doesn’t seem to have as many different types of weapons as Jagged Alliance 2, I can definitely say that Jagged Alliance 3 still has an impressive selection of different weapons to acquire. You won’t have access to weapons like the LAW rocket launcher or the rail gun like in Jagged Alliance 2, nor do you have access to as many different types of rifles, or things like the brass knuckles, but you still have a good enough selection of sub-machine guns, assault rifles, pistols, revolvers, shotguns, explosive weaponry, and even mortars.
It makes sense why they don’t have as many weapons in Jagged Alliance 3, and it’s because unlike Jagged Alliance 2, the weapons aren’t just xml entries with default weapon category sprites. In Jagged Alliance 3 all of the weapons have 3D models and actually appear in the game, along with the mods that you place on them. Now I’m not too fond of the new modding system, where you have to gather scrap and then use it to mod attachments to weapons – I preferred being able to just buy the modifications from the store or retrieve them from enemies after killing them. But that’s neither here nor there.
They also removed the mag stripping from Jagged Alliance 2, so you can’t field strip the 7.62 ammo from a Springfield clip and add it to a FN-Fal magazine. Well, that would be assuming the Springfield was in Jagged Alliance 3. Basically, field stripping and mixing and matching ammo into a clip or magazine is no longer possible. One thing that I thought was really cool was using SMG magazines on compatible pistols at the expense of extra AP in Jagged Alliance 2. It wasn’t very effective, but it was neat that they let you do that. That kind of item micromanagement isn’t possible in Jagged Alliance 3, but at least they still have different ammo types and weapons, which gives the game a nice diversity of ways in which to equip your mercenaries.
Good: Takes The Piss Out Of Communism
This isn’t a big thing, but with so much western media paying lip-service to communism, it was nice to see the developers take the absolute piss out of communism. There is a completely incompetent local rebel group who consider themselves communists and it’s funny listening to their conversations about how every other communist regime fell or was toppled and why it never works, and then one of the soldiers replies with “Well, that’s because real communism has never been tried”.
It’s not much of a spoiler to point out that the communist rebels don’t last long (one way or another). But the game continues to take potshots at communism throughout the game, which was nice. But it makes sense given that Haemimont is from Bulgaria, and as many people know, Bulgaria was one of the many Eastern European states that fell victim to the machinations of communism throughout the mid 20th century, and it had a very lasting impact on the nation and its culture. So, unlike many college-influenced westerners who lionize communism, Bulgarians actually lived through the horrors of it for decades and understand its detrimental effects on a nation. Hence, it was nice to see them appropriately take the piss out of communism.
Good: Visually Pleasing
Another important aspect of Jagged Alliance 3 are its visuals. No, it does not look like The Last of Us 2 or Death Stranding and it doesn’t have to. The game looks good nonetheless, and still has real-time lighting and shadows, and extremely pleasing destructible environments just like the previous games. You can blow holes through walls, completely level floors, and shoot through or shoot out various objects.
It’s all rendered in 3D unlike the static mats and isometric sprites used in Jagged Alliance 1 and Jagged Alliance 2. There were some other spin-off Jagged Alliance games made by other studios that were in 3D, but they weren’t real to me.
The closest games to Jagged Alliance 3 have been the Hired Guns games and the 7.62 games, which were also in 3D and also featured destructible environments, but those games were so tedious to play that destroying the environment never really felt all that satisfying. Though, I will admit that using the mortars in those games was a lot more reliable and a lot more efficient than in Jagged Alliance 3.
But otherwise, the 3D destruction and map design with the visuals, weather effects, day and night cycles, and combat mechanics are all really well done in Jagged Alliance 3.
Good: Turn-Based AP
Ever since Firaxis’ reimagining of MicroProse’s UFO Defense or X-Com series as a more action-oriented turn-based series, every other developer has been tripping over themselves to ruin turn-based strategy games by getting rid of time units and action points. Why? Just why? If you want to play Call of Duty, play Call of Duty, but we’re playing turn-based strategy games because we want to play turn-based strategy games. Reducing the actions to two-actions to a fixed amount and forcing a limited amount of engagement per map in all of the copy-cats of Firaxis’ rendition of XCOM has basically pushed me away from the turn-based genre for nearly a decade, plus forcing the limit of squads to just six characters and not being able to have multiple squads attack a single map is unforgivable.
Here, however, you can have up to six mercs per squad and multiple squads attacking a single map, which is fantastic. Plus, the actual turns consists of proper action points, or AP. Just like in the previous Jagged Alliance games, your mercs start off with just a few AP, but as you level them up and progress through the game, you can gain more AP, plus get buffs from higher morale.
Another neat thing is that you can also increase AP for certain actions through unlocking perks as you level up each character. This is fantastic as you can really build out a specialization for each merc based on how you want to play them. Want to be an explosive expert? Get a perk that gives you a free move after throwing a grenade. Want to build out a sniper that can move freely around the map? Give them the light armor perk so they can get more spaces to move freely or the perk to reduce AP to move to higher places or climb ladders with fewer penalties.
Basically, you get the best of both worlds. You get a lot of the advancements made to the turn-based genre that Firaxis introduced, such as the more advanced cover system, overwatch, and being able to fire around corners, while also still retaining a lot of the core elements and AP-based functionality that made the original two Jagged Alliance games and their expansions so fun. Plus, with the action camera, it really adds to the appeal, especially seeing a merc jump through a window, and use a shotgun to blast a guy through a wooden door as it shatters to pieces. Excellent stuff.
Good: Map Diversity
There is a pretty good selection of maps in Jagged Alliance 3, including desert plains, jungle roads, small villages, swamps, underground tunnels, caverns, chasm chokepoints, and a variety of bases, installations, and mines. The combination of the maps with different weather effects and time of day can also impact things like visibility and how effective you are or the enemy when it comes to the combat scenario.
Weather effects like rain, fog, heat, or dust storms will drastically affect how the battle turns out, for better or for worse. Sometimes this can make battles drag on forever as fog or poor visibility means even when you’re pretty close to enemies you’re only doing grazing shots, and so you will either have to close the distance and risk taking a lot of damage, or keep your distance and burn through a lot of ammo grazing each other. But overall, there are a lot of different maps in Jagged Alliance 3.
Good: Variety Of Ways To Tackle Most Maps
There is a decent variety of ways to tackle most of the maps in Jagged Alliance 3. Given that the maps aren’t as large as the maps from Jagged Alliance 2, it absolutely does restrict just how tactical you can get with approaching most maps. This does make flanking tactics especially difficult compared to Jagged Alliance 2, where you could more easily surround a point of interest with multiple mercs and just light up the bad guys.
Some of the maps are designed that way in Jagged Alliance 3, where you can encircle enemies and flanked them using a good set of tactics. That’s when the game felt most fun to me. It was the more narrow or set-piece focused maps with limited maneuverability where I had the most frustrations and where the fights definitely took way longer than I felt they should have. Because ultimately narrow or maps with limited maneuverability force you into using specific tactics to succeed, and some players may fare better at that than others, and I absolutely did not fare well at that at all.
Even still, for the maps that gave you the option to approach them more methodically and open-endedly, I really enjoyed them and it gave a nice sense of accomplishment even if it took an hour or two to just setup the mercs and get them into position to execute a perfect, tactically sound takedown of enemies. It was always satisfying seeing that kind of plan come together and the tactics working as they should. In some ways it was more satisfying than many of my most successful playthroughs of Jagged Alliance 2, because the newer mechanics like overwatch and being able to peek-around corners finally gives players the tools to execute the kind of tactics that we just did not have in Jagged Alliance 2. Even still, I really appreciate many of the ways in which players can tackle most of the maps in Jagged Alliance 3, and utilize the tactical tools to fulfill very satisfying combat scenarios.
Good: George Strezov’s Soundtrack
The first two Jagged Alliance games had some decent music for what they were. They captured the mood and the ambiance of the game’s jungle-themed adventures. There have always been a lot of use of percussion instruments fused with wind instruments to create this tropical-combat feeling. That kind of orchestration still exists with Jagged Alliance 3, but composer George Strezov goes for a much more bombastic, cinematic quality for the overall feel of the game, and it works out marvelously thanks to the Johannesburg vocals and the top-tier performances by the Four For Music Orchestra.
From the satellite menu screen to the tactical view, every piece of music for the game, including the vocals, the ambient tracks, and even the combat music all help bring Grand Chien to life. All that being said, it’s not hard to say that out of all of the Jagged Alliance games and the various clones and spin-offs, Jagged Alliance 3 has the best original soundtrack hands-down. Usually I would replace the music with my own custom playlist, but this time I kept all of Strezov’s songs perfectly in place and found them not just fitting for the experience but actually elevating the gameplay, compelling me to keep playing. In some ways it reminded me a bit of a more cinematic oriented score of what Jesper Kyd did with the original Hitman: Codename 47 game back in the early aughts.
Everything Bad About Jagged Alliance 3
Bad: Stealth Kills
I struggle with this because some of the stealth does work wonderfully, but it’s spotty at best. The issue is that when you have characters like Blood, who excel at melee-stealth kills using a knife or machete, you expect that it should work more often than not, just like if you have an explosive expert, you expect that if their equipment is in good working order, they should execute their explosive tasks with the expertise that you hired them for. The problem is that how you execute stealth melee kills outside of the turn-based combat is very… janky.
You have to first select the attack icon and then select where to attack the enemy. Now the real trick is that you don’t just tap “Attack”, you instead have to move the character within one space of the enemy you wish to attack where it shows the “Move” icon. Once your character gets close enough, then they will initiate the stealth kill. The problem here is that you have to actually get close enough before the enemy notices you and even then you can still miss the attack, which is just beyond frustrating. This turns melee-stealth kills into an exercise of save-scumming and luck.
It can work, and oftentimes I would use it, but not without usually having to reload the game several times over. You might get close and then the enemy turns around and spots them; you might click to attack but forgot to move within one space of the enemy so they never attack as intended; or before you can even get close they get spotted through a wall or through a window. The easy fix here is when you’re in the real-time phase and you click to attack the enemy via a stealth attack, just have the merc walk up and attack them instead of the extra movement to an empty space near the enemy.
Now, I will say that sniper stealth attacks work much better, and by the end-game I was using them to clear out pretty much all of the bad guys who were semi-isolated. It would have been nice that while prepping for an attack you could also assign other mercs attacks the way you can with the mortars, but I guess beggars can’t be choosers. I will say that by end-game, with all of the proper stealth perks, characters like Blood are going to be one of your most valuable characters just because of how many people he can kill in a single turn, especially as you alternate between his special running-throwing knives and the reduced AP cost for throwing his knives. I just wish the out-of-combat stealth mechanics were less janky.
Bad: Map Sizes
Don’t expect the map sizes from Jagged Alliance 2 or Unfinished Business. The maps may be very well designed in Jagged Alliance 3 but they are criminally small. The good part about this is that you will no longer spend hours on end scouring the map for some lone NPC enemy who decided to crouch down behind a bush in a thicket and hide from you. The bad part is that you are severely limited in many ways when it comes to how you approach some maps.
Yes, I said that it was good that there is a variety of ways to tackle some of the maps, but the flip side is that due to limited map sizes there is a lack of ways to tackle some maps as well. This results in having to sometimes engage enemies in ways you did not intend, or limiting how you position some enemies.
A good example is that the port where the General is holed up has three entrances: you can enter from the top, the bottom, or through a secret passage way you uncover while doing the U-Bach missions. The secret passage way is not a good way to enter the map at all, as you’ll be pigeonholed into a building, but the upside is that you could technically funnel the enemy through the doorway and kill them there. The best way is to enter from the bottom and then funnel the enemies through the gate using silenced sniper rifles. So long as they don’t spot you, the mortar men won’t fire on you.
In Jagged Alliance 2, when you attacked places like the prison or some of the other fortified locations, you could typically enter from any side, and the maps were large enough where you could tactically approach the prime point of interest from any angle. This made it very convenient to sneak up and place explosives around the map and then trigger them when ready.
Since the maps are much smaller in Jagged Alliance 3, the stealth opportunities are much more limited in how you approach them, and by proxy, limits what sort of tactics you can use. Now I don’t think the maps needed to be as big as the ones from Jagged Alliance 2 or the 7.62 series, but maybe being slightly larger would enable more opportunities in how you approached tackling the maps. This became especially troublesome in smaller maps where they would force you to enter where you couldn’t help but be spotted, which usually resulted in those fights taking longer than the encounters on the larger more open maps.
By the end game, I basically found that the best approach was to lure enemies into a bottleneck. This was something I learned the hard way fighting the German super soldiers. But basically, once you understand how or where to setup a bottleneck, the encounters become much easier.
Bad: Some Battles Can Take Hours/Days To Complete
This kind of ties into the map sizes… but basically, some encounters just took forever to complete. And that was mostly my fault, but also due to the map sizes and the limited way in which you could setup your troops. Another issue was that because you are limited to only eight militia per sector, unlike having up to 20 in Jagged Alliance 2. The problem, however, is that AI attack squads can group up and attack sectors, between four and 20 men, which is, of course, not fair.
Hence, with the limited militia numbers and certain events in the game resulting in a large force of enemies attacking certain sectors, it means you have to engage in some battles that can take an extremely long time. I think if they just let you train up as many militia men as the enemy AI, then it wouldn’t be a problem, since they could have multiple squads at a single sector, but you could not (unless it was your own hired mercs plus the militia).
Bad: Inconsistent Aim Mechanics
One of the ways that battles can extend well beyond what they should take is the sometimes inconsistent aim mechanics. Typically you expect that max aim level should get you a hit, especially at point blank range… right?… Right? Well, that’s not always the case.
This is a problem that was also typically present in Hired Guns and the 7.62 series. It’s a weird and frustrating thing where you have an enemy right in front of you and the merc just completely misses every shot even with aiming. It’s a minor thing that eventually dissipates as you get further into the game, but it really is annoying when you have someone standing right in front of your merc and they miss pretty badly even with auto-fire, yet you have a merc that can snipe someone in the head from halfway across the map.
It’s not a game-breaking thing, but you may find yourself save-scumming in tight situations where you have some enemies in point blank range and your merc miraculously misses.
Bad: Limited Item Micromanagement
There were a lot of really fantastic features in Jagged Alliance 2 that games today don’t even bother with, save for a few. This is because Sir-Tech was making games back when just running games on PC required a level of intelligence and dedication that forced you to get good. Boot disks, rearranging how you utilized expanded memory, messing with the config.sys and autoexec.bat per game, or trying to get Sound Blaster 16 to work in a game that allegedly supported it were tasks that could see you tinkering with software (and hardware) well into the middle of the night. The things we used to do to play the good games back in the day.
In many ways, the difficulty of just playing games on PC back in the 1990s and early aughts carried over into how many PC games played. Back then you didn’t have yellow waypoints everywhere, you didn’t have hand-holding to ensure that you didn’t mess up the story, and you had tons of item micromanagement in just about every RPG, strategy game, and equipment-based action game. I loved it. Jagged Alliance 2 was probably the pinnacle of item micromanagement along with Baldur’s Gate; these games just let you deck out your characters with a ton of stuff, but Jagged Alliance 2 took the cake and there has not been a game since that comes close, except for maybe Escape from Tarkov.
Jagged Alliance 3 still lets you carry multiple weapons, grenades, and medical supplies, but they completely removed the exhaustion management. Instead you now just have to let your characters rest instead of having them drink from a canteen to restore their stamina so they can keep traveling. They also removed the backpacks, they removed the ability to hold keys, the removed the ability to apply camouflage manually to different armour, they also combined the headset and helmet slots together, so you can no longer wear a helmet with night vision goggles.
There is still some item micromanagement, as you can still setup your helmet, chest, and leg armor, as well as hold up to two two-handed weapons in the primary weapon slots, or dual-wield two single-handed weapons. But they drastically reduced the item slots, and by proxy, this also greatly reduced a lot of other gameplay aspects when it comes to squad equipment and item holding.
Bad: Squad Items And Smaller Backpacks
While this could technically be bundled into the lack of item micromanagement, I wanted to specifically talk about how the reduction in squad items and backpacks was such a huge step backward for me compared to Jagged Alliance 2. Basically, you could deck your character out like Arnold from Commando in Jagged Alliance 2: you had a backpack, two side pouches, a belt, chest rig, and leg pouches.
The different item pouches were mostly limited by a character’s strength rating, so characters who didn’t have high strength couldn’t carry as many items due to becoming encumbered. Even then, you could basically use those with low strength to carry extra ammo or smaller items such as crafting material or explosives.
In Jagged Alliance 3, characters have a fixed backpack size, and all of your ammo and supplies are put into a “Squad Items” category. I like and dislike this.
I like it because you can rack up a ton of ammo, and as many of you know, lugging around a lot of ammo in Jagged Alliance 2 could severely weigh down your merc. Being able to carry almost indefinite amounts of ammo in Jagged Alliance 3 means that ammo is almost never an issue so long as you keep it stockpiled. However, the drawback is that crafting items and additional weapons become a chore to keep around due to limited backpack space unless you have a few choice mercs on your team like Grizzly, Steroid, and Meltdown (among others), who can keep a lot of miscellaneous items in their backpack.
Otherwise you will spend a lot of time doing the kind of item micromanagement Tetris that you don’t typically like due to limited space rather than proficient item utilization. You no longer can equip item storage based on availability, instead you have a fixed backpack space and the squad stash. Now I understand that the squad stash makes it easier for new players to manage their items, but I sincerely miss the plethora of storage options and slots available for the obscene amounts of item micromanagement in Jagged Alliance 2.