Sector maps are huge and enemies can be found patrolling all over the place, so you need to constantly move the camera manually to avoid being ambushed. This is amazingly awkward because you can do everything else with the stylus. Instead of allowing you to pan around by dragging the screen with the stylus as in many other DS games, you need to use the D pad. This evolution is not reflected here, which leaves the mechanics clumsy and boring.Ĭontrols are the biggest issue, particularly when it comes to managing the camera. More importantly, though, turn-based strategy gaming has undergone a lot of changes during the past decade and a half. Every sector looks the same, and your mercs are multicolored blobs. Only the well-acted and numerous voice samples have weathered the years well. For starters, you cannot ignore the passage of time. These positive characteristics are still present in the DS version of Jagged Alliance, although they are hard to appreciate nowadays. The shots can be precise, but the controls rarely are. You might have even shed a tear (or at least reloaded a save) whenever one of them was gunned down. After three or four sectors, your gangs of cruel thugs turned into your buddies, making it easy to empathize with such murderous goons as Ivan, Tex, and Larry. So much detail was crammed into each character that it felt like you were hiring real people. mercenary gave the game a strong role-playing vibe. Detailed biographies, skill sets, and equipment for each A.I.M. Each sector was a grueling slog through gangs of enemy soldiers. Even at the very beginning, you had to carefully manage your action points and approach firefights very carefully to keep all of your mercs in one piece. At the same time, you have to expand in a careful fashion because expensive guards must be hired to protect conquered sectors, along with workers to harvest the sap.įifteen years ago, this all added up to a brilliant experience on the PC. Each sector comes with a crop of trees that can be tapped to make money, which is necessary to keep your mercenaries happy and to hire new, more expensive goons with superior skills and equipment. Individual fights are just part of the strategic challenge here, though. This gives every movement a strategic dimension because you can't approach an enemy without planning out how many action points you are going to burn when you walk over to him, crouch down behind cover, and squeeze off a couple of shots. All combat is handled in traditional turn-based fashion, with you leading teams of mercs into enemy-occupied sectors and fighting set-piece tactical battles using action points on all activities. You do so by hiring mercs from the Association of International Mercenaries (A.I.M.) who battle it out over the 60 sectors on Metavira. But in video game land, the Richards refuse to take this lying down and call you in to fight back. In the real world, this is where the story would end. They're bamboozled by a former research assistant named Lucas Santino, who takes the island over for his own nefarious profit-making purposes and stocks it with soldiers. Yet kindly old Jack (who looks like the "Most Interesting Man in the World" from the Dos Equis commercials) and his leggy Latina daughter are robbed of their chance to save the planet. Nuclear tests conducted on the island in the 1950s have resulted in a mutant generation of Fallow trees producing sap that can cure all manner of diseases. You take on the role of an unseen military advisor to scientist Jack Richards and his daughter, Brenda, on the tropical island of Metavira. What made the original Jagged Alliance so compelling back in the day is still present, however. Loads of mercenary details give Jagged Alliance a serious role-playing-game feel. A few design tweaks and a revamped control system would have made this blast from the past a lot more enjoyable. Developer Cypron Studios has ported the PC original to the Nintendo handheld in its entirety with few-if any-changes, and sadly the game has not aged well. If you want to take a trip back in time to 1994, there are plenty of better options than playing Jagged Alliance for the Nintendo DS.
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