Jagged Alliance: Back in Action Review
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Just like in Jagged Alliance 2, Back in Action takes place on the island of Arulco. As the game opens up, you learn that a woman named Deidranna killed her father the king of Arulco and then framed her husband Enrico for the murder, and is now running the island as a despot queen, wringing as much money out of it as possible. After laying low for ten years, Enrico has finally decided that enough is enough, and he pays you $40,000 so you can hire some mercenaries from A.I.M. (the Association of International Mercenaries), make contact with the rebels on Arulco, and knock Deidranna out of power.
To start out in the game, you have to take your $40,000 and hire one or more mercenaries so you can capture the airport on Arulco, which will then function as your base of operations and allow you to hire additional mercenaries and purchase equipment from an online store. The battle at the airport is basically a tutorial, with lots of solo enemies just waiting for you to kill them, but then the missions ramp up in difficulty, culminating with confronting Deidranna at her palace.
The mercenaries in the game are much more anonymous than they used to be. They have a purchase price (ranging from $10,000 to $80,000), traits (including "nudist" and "loner"), and stats (which you can build up as your mercenaries gain levels), but that's about it. After playing through the campaign, only once did I discover two mercenaries who wouldn't work together, and they never refused to follow orders, or ever started a conversation. The only thing that differentiates them is what they say when they spot an enemy, or take damage, or run out of stamina. In other words, Kalypso pretty much wiped away all of the personality of the mercenaries and made them into the simple automatons you find in games like Silent Storm and X-Com: UFO Defense. But at least most if not all of the A.I.M. mercenaries are back from Jagged Alliance 2.
The map of Arulco is highlighted by several locations, including towns, diamond mines, road blocks, a hospital, and more. Each time you capture a location (by defeating all of the enemy soldiers there), you gain some sort of bonus, usually in the form of daily income. With a location in your hands, you're also allowed to interact with the locals there, and some will give you quests, or sell you items, or offer to join you as new mercenaries (although in general, they're not as good as your purchased mercenaries). Deidranna will sometimes send out attack squads to recapture locations, but you can arm the locals to form a militia, and they'll try to fend off the attacks. Militia members aren't allowed to leave their location, and they're pretty bad in combat, but they'll usually hold off Deidranna's goons long enough so you can get there with one of your squads and save the day.
Combat in the game is conducted in real time -- which is at odds with the earlier Jagged Alliance games, which were all turn-based -- but you're allowed to pause the game at any time and issue orders, and even coordinate actions (such as ordering all of your mercenaries to open fire at the same moment), so it's not so bad. Soldiers can crouch or lie prone, and the closer to the ground they are, the slower they move but the quieter they are and the better they aim. You can also place your mercenaries into "guard" mode, which causes them to automatically shoot at any target within range, or you can take total control of them and direct where they move and shoot. Along with a variety of guns, there are also grenades and rocket launchers and land mines and melee weapons available, so you're given all sorts of options for how to defeat your enemies.
Besides weapons, mercenaries can also carry medical supplies (for healing), pliers (for defusing land mines), crowbars and lockpicks (for opening doors), and repair kits (for repairing weapons). They also get to wear armor, which both protects them and provides camouflage. Oddly, while weapons can be repaired and only take gradual damage, armor wears out quickly and can't be repaired. Apparently, armor was intended to be the main money sink in the game, but it gets thrashed so quickly that I eventually stopped bothering with it and just made sure my mercenaries had good shooting positions -- and a good medic with them.
The 3D graphics for Back in Action get the job done without being overly exciting. Everything looks how it should, whether you zoom in or out, and whether it's daytime or nighttime, but "special effects" like explosions and smoke are minimal and kind of sad (prepare to be disappointed if you ever throw a smoke grenade). Most of the damage is done with bullets, which aren't modeled, and nothing in the terrain can be destroyed (so thin wooden doors keep out your burly mercenaries, and palm trees stop tank fire). Meanwhile, the voice actors are mostly competent. All 40 mercenaries from A.I.M. have a couple minutes' worth of dialogue each, and they all perform their lines respectably (at least for the mercenaries I hired), but a couple of the quest NPCs are likely to evoke cringes.
In theory at least, Back in Action should work, as it uses mostly the same formula as Jagged Alliance 2, just with some nods to current conventions. The problem the game has is that bugs and sloppiness abound, to the point where I wonder if it was even playtested. Consider something "simple" like the camera controls. You can only rotate the camera by pressing the alt key and moving the mouse, and you can only change the pitch by zooming in. That makes adjusting your view awkward at best, and because you can only target enemies you can see with the camera (as opposed to see with your mercenaries), it becomes almost impossible to issue orders when your mercenaries are outside and enemies are inside, which happens all the time.
Want more? You're not allowed to name your saves. You're not allowed to remap the hotkeys. There isn't a quicksave option. You're allowed to speed up time on the world map but not on combat maps. Grenades are almost impossible to use indoors because your mercenaries aren't smart enough not to throw them into the ceiling. Your mercenaries have a morale rating, but it doesn't appear to do anything. Your mercenaries aren't allowed to shoot an enemy who gets into melee range. Enemies regularly leave good defensive positions to come charging at you (this is how I ended up killing Deidranna). Icons for squads and mercenaries regularly stop working. The game has a restrictive level cap, and so there isn't any way for cheap mercenaries to eventually become as powerful as expensive mercenaries (and worse, you're probably expected to replace your initial mercenaries for the end-game content, which is just terrible from an RPG perspective). Enemies use good weapons against you and then drop junk when they die. And speaking of junk, you can find items like dead rats, breakfast cereal, and porn magazines when you loot containers, which is just bizarre.
It took me about 60 hours to complete the campaign for Jagged Alliance: Back in Action. I didn't hate my time with the game, but it certainly didn't wow me, either, and I'm not holding my breath waiting for an expansion pack. The change from turn-based to real-time action didn't bother me (since I recognize that I'm in the minority in enjoying turn-based games), but the neutering of the mercenaries did. I don't understand why developers take a unique franchise and then whittle away the unique parts to make it more like everything else.
Right now, Back in Action is available for somewhere around $40. If you enjoy squad-based strategy / RPG hybrids, then you might have some fun with the game, but I'd recommend that you wait for the price to drop down to $20, or at least wait for a patch or two -- or three -- to come out. Or you could just buy the original Jagged Alliance 2, which is a better game and probably pretty cheap at this point.
