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- Jagged alliance -  
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Jagged alliance is a great
tactical combat game in which you control a bunch of mercenaries trying
to take control back over an island. The story goes as follows: Many years
ago there were nuclear tests done on an island called Metaviria but now
many decades later the island is inhabited. On the island now grows a tree
that produces the fallow sap which can be used as a cure for a certain illness,
the thing is that this is the only known cure and the tree only grows on
Metaviria. Your employer Brenda and her father now have lost control of
the island to a local called Lucas Santano who has also burned down a research
lab. Now you have to take back the island with the help of the mercenaries
you hire.
The first thing you have to do when starting the game is to hire a number
of mercenaries and at first this task seems daunting because there are so
many to choose. You'll find out quickly that some of them are below average
and many of the experienced ones won't help you before they check out your
leadership abilities so you'll have to compromise. Each mercenary has a
range of abilities like medical, aim, mechanic and explosives as well as
physical statistics that show if the characters is in good shape. You'll
have to get a balanced group with various members that can do different
jobs as it's no use getting someone to do something they have no skill at.
The better character usually have multiple skills but at the beginning of
the game your income isn't high enough to allow you to hire many of them.
Also each character has a personality and they might have problems working
with some of the other mercenaries or they can start to dislike you if you
cause a lot of casualties.
After hiring people you start the next day and you can outfit them with
some extra spare items and you can imploy natives as guards and harvesters
who will collect the sap from the trees. Select the starting grid which
is currently limited to the bottom right corner of the island and you're
off. The main game is played from a birdseye view where you can view and
give orders to your people, any buildings only show their 'insides' once
one of your members stand inside. The first area is completely under your
control so you can wander around collecting items but when you travel to
an enemy controlled location the game switches to turnbased control where
every characters has a set amount of action points they can use to do things
like walking and shooting. You'll have to make good use of the environment
like hiding and ducking behind trees to minimize the chances of being shot.
Enemy characters only become visable when one of your characters spots them
but the same goes for your people as well so try and stay hidden to get
an edge. Some of the buildings have locked doors and if your mechanic has
a toolkit he can try to pick the lock, this is not always necessary during
a firefight but if an enemy is hiding in a building you'll have no choice.
If you can't pick the lock you are force to bomb the place to open it up.
When all enemy characters are disabled you gain control of that area and
you can walk around freely again and move in friendly natives to guard the
area. This goes on until either the sun sets or you call it quits for the
day but remember to pick up any items left by enemies and crates scattered
throughout the levels.
Between days you also have to manage injured people and you can assign someone
with medical skills to treat them. Also mechanics can fix broken equipment
or make improvements like putting silencers or a scope on a gun, you can
even make whole new equipment if you have the items like molotov cocktails
and timed bombs. This makes picking up seemingly useless equipment more
fun because who'd think you can make something usefull out of a rag, empty
bottle and some gas. Remember that you still have to pay people even if
they are not out in the field so try and use the lower paid ones for fixing
stuff if you can. The goal of the game is to conquer the area where Santano
is hiding out which is the upper left corner of the island. While capturing
areas you gain control over more and more land which enables you to collect
more sap from the trees thus increasing your daily paycheck. You can hire
more guards to protect them while you are away as well as giving you the
option of getting the better skilled mercenaries. The best of all is simply
called mike with 90+ on all but one of his abilites but he costs a whopping
12 grand per day but believe me the guy is worth it.
Jagged alliance is one of my favorite games of all time as there is so much to the game and it is executed perfectly. Little things like taking canteens of water on hot days to make sure your people stay healthy and making/repairing object complete the game. If that wasn't enough each of the characters has a distinct personality and the CD version has full speech for all of them! My favorite character is called Elio which you get for free if you have a spot open on the team, he's pretty useless and can't hit a guy standing right next to him but he's always got stories about parts of the island you visit and talks funny. If you can get the CD version I suggest you get it because the speech really adds to the game but even the disk version is a great game. The only flaw it might have is that you can't buy any weapons but it's only a small speck in this great game, if you haven't played it yet get it now!
Overal rating: 9.5/10
Erde Kaiser
Jagged alliance was released for one system here are some notes:
| DOS |
Released in
1994.
Game has been tested but not completed on a DOS and windows PC.
Works ok under windows. This is the disk version and is missing most of
the speech found in the CD version. |
| Others |
There was
standalone datadisk released called deadly games that did allow you to buy
items but it is mission based meaning that you play the game per mission
and not in a flowing story like this one. Also there was a sequel made with
another expansion pack for windows systems , they are still for sale at
some places. |
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Date added |
Apr-26-2005 19:27 |
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Name |
Jagged alliance |
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Developer |
Madlab software
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Publisher |
Sir-Tech
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First released |
1994 |
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Genre |
Strategy
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Download |
MS-DOS, filesize: 9351 Kb
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Links |
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Manual |
Download manual for Jagged alliance
, filesize: 986 Kb
This is the scanned manual and it also contains the quick reference guide. |
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Solve / Docs |
No solve available
No extra docs available |
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Sitestats
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03-Sep-2010
Games: 404
Utils: 30
Manuals: 193
Solves: 83
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