It’s been 20 years since the events of the first Jagged Alliance.
Fans of the original games will recognise the names here (Fidel, Grunty, Raven etc.), although each of them looks well past their heyday at this point. It turns out everything in Jagged Alliance: Rage is on the brink of falling apart, including the two mercs you’ll select for your initial squad. This might not have been a huge problem if the game didn’t absolutely require you to be thinking about your inventory at all times. Rage does not do much to help you out here. Some of those enemies, by the way, will now be hidden in the fog of war. You’ll no longer need to stand next to an enemy to loot them, but you do need to individually click on each and every fallen soldier across a map that you’ve likely been fighting through for the last half an hour or more. Instead, you’re forced to track down each of the soldiers you’ve killed and root through their pockets one-by-one, swapping items back and forth as you manage a very limited amount of inventory space across each member of your squad. Looting in JA: Rage is an extremely laborious process and one that’s begging to be replaced by a post-mission screen that collects all of the various items and ammunition you’ve missed in one place. This is a really important part of the process and it’s also a real low point for the game. But it’s also a game about ensuring your mercs remain armed to the teeth over the course of what will be a long and trying campaign.Īnd so once you’ve defeated the enemy force in a mission, you’ll need to start looting. They take on entire armies of laughably evil bad guys while making quips about how good they are at doing exactly that. It’s a turn-based strategy affair in which your small team of elite, grizzled mercenaries trudges through a hot jungle. Just like its predecessors from the 90s, JA: Rage is a game of two halves. What holds my trigger finger is the knowledge of what comes after I’ve taken the shot. Perhaps I’ve started to doubt the cause my small team of mercenaries has been fighting for? Maybe killing hundreds of nameless soldiers in exchange for cash is part of the problem? Nope. If you were to examine my face during these moments, noting the hollow look in my eyes as my cursor hovers over a button labelled ‘Do it’, you might suspect some crisis of conscience. In Jagged Alliance: Rage, I pause before taking the final shot in each mission.
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