Jagged Alliance 3 review: Mercenaries, mayhem and too much admin

I played a little of Jagged Alliance 3 with a friend around three years ago, but never got particularly far. Coming back and finally finishing an entire campaign, there isn't some enormous revelation waiting at the end of it. I had fun. Quite a lot of fun, actually.

You can feel the budget in places, but the game seems perfectly comfortable with that. It knows exactly what it is and commits completely to its own strange little world, putting far more effort into personality than pretending to be some enormous prestige production.

The whole thing is tongue-in-cheek, constantly parodying military clichés, action films, national stereotypes and itself. References are everywhere, characters routinely behave like lunatics and the writing generally doesn't give a shit about appearing sophisticated. Somehow it all remains completely faithful to the tone of the series. This is simply what this world is like.

Fortunately, there is also a genuinely enjoyable turn-based tactical RPG underneath all of the piss-taking.

The mercenaries make the game:

The mercenary roster is easily the highlight.

These aren't interchangeable classes with different portraits attached. Each merc has their own stats, speciality, relationships, voice, ridiculous personality and an enormous collection of contextual lines. They'll comment on locations, jobs, other mercs and whatever stupid situation you've managed to drag them into, while likes and dislikes can even affect who is willing to work together. The developers specifically built the roster around fully voiced characters with their own quirks and relationships rather than disposable tactical units.

Fox and Steroid became my favourites, and they're good examples of just how much character Haemimont managed to squeeze out of what are ultimately two people on a mercenary hiring website.

Steroid is basically a walking Arnold Schwarzenegger action-film parody with a healthy dose of Duke Nukem. He's a gigantic Polish bodybuilder, talks like every sentence should have been delivered immediately before an explosion and carries himself with the absolute confidence of a man who has never once considered that he might look ridiculous. Even his special ability has him punching someone hard enough to send them flying.

Fox goes in almost the opposite direction. She's completely aware of her appearance, plays into the pin-up persona and seemingly cannot get through a conversation without slipping in another double entendre. Half her dialogue sounds innocent for about one second before you realise exactly what she meant, and she usually sounds like she knows perfectly well that you realised it too. Her Striking Looks talent even turns the joke into a combat mechanic by letting her catch enemies surprised when she initiates combat.

They're ridiculous caricatures, but that's precisely why they work here. The joke isn't simply that Steroid has an accent or Fox says something horny again. They remain committed to these personalities through an absurd amount of dialogue, and after dozens of hours I was still happy to hear them open their mouths.

That personality also feeds naturally into squad building. Mercs arrive with different attributes and practical skills covering things like medicine, mechanics, explosives and marksmanship, then perks and equipment let you develop them further. There are enough weapons and customisation options to make putting a squad together interesting without burying everything under some enormous class system.

You hire people, work out what they're good at, give them equipment that suits it and gradually turn the collection of weirdos you started with into an extremely efficient collection of weirdos.

The actual fighting is satisfying:

The combat isn't an especially deep tactical simulation, but there is enough going on to keep it entertaining across a long campaign.

You've got different weapon categories, ammunition, attachments, explosives, armour, perks, mercenary attributes, stances, overwatch and aimed shots targeting specific body parts. Different guns genuinely give you different options, and finding something new usually made me want to immediately start messing around with attachments or work out who should have it.

Most importantly, the basic act of shooting someone feels good.

Weapons have a satisfying crack to them, impacts have decent visual feedback and lining up an aimed shot before watching someone collapse on the other side of the map rarely gets old. The game doesn't need an enormous simulation sitting underneath every trigger pull when the basic feedback already sells the shot.

There is enough flexibility to experiment with how you equip everyone, too. Mercs naturally fall into certain roles because of their stats, but equipment and perks leave room to push them in different directions as your arsenal expands. It hits a good middle ground between having meaningful character builds and making you spend half your evening staring at numbers.

There is plenty worth finding:

Grand Chien also ended up having considerably more interesting side content than I expected.

The map isn't just a collection of combat sectors waiting to be painted in your colour. There are side quests, odd characters, hidden areas and plenty of little discoveries scattered around, with quite a few decisions producing noticeable consequences later.

Some situations can change who survives, what happens to a settlement or how another part of the campaign resolves. The main story itself can branch around what you've done, and there are enough different ending states that the game does actually keep track of quite a lot of your behaviour.

I wouldn't pretend every quest is some amazing piece of RPG writing, but exploration regularly gave me something worth stopping for rather than simply another box of ammunition hidden behind a building. The same personality running through the mercenaries also extends into the people you meet, so even relatively minor jobs can turn into something strange.

For a game primarily built around tactical combat and territorial control, there is a respectable amount of actual RPG in here.

Then you become too powerful:

My biggest issue became increasingly obvious because I went for a fairly thorough playthrough.

Eventually my mercenaries were levelled, well equipped and completely established. Even on a harder difficulty, most opposition stopped being much of a threat. By that stage I could walk into sectors and flatten whatever was waiting there with very little trouble.

There is some satisfaction in reaching that point. You've spent the campaign building these people up, finding better weapons, improving their skills and establishing control over the country, so becoming terrifyingly effective feels earned.

The problem is that there is still a lot of map left afterwards.

If you're trying to do nearly everything, the late game gradually turns into travelling to another sector, clearing it, checking the loot, sorting your gear and moving on. Battles that would have been interesting twenty hours earlier become another job because you already know the outcome.

The strategic layer suffers from the same problem. Managing territory, moving squads around and keeping everything supplied works while those decisions carry pressure. Once your economy is comfortable and most enemies are being bulldozed, you're still performing a lot of the same actions without much remaining tension behind them.

Someone please automate the paperwork:

Inventory management becomes particularly annoying during a full campaign.

There is a point where having limited equipment space stops creating interesting decisions and starts creating work. You're carrying different ammunition types, weapons, explosives, medical supplies, armour and miscellaneous equipment, while sector stashes gradually accumulate even more stuff. Moving it around and deciding what can safely be abandoned becomes increasingly fiddly as your operation grows.

Mercenary contracts are another small system that becomes irritating through repetition. Having limited contracts makes sense because these are hired mercenaries and their wages form part of the campaign economy. What I don't need is to repeatedly negotiate with individual members of a squad that I obviously intend to keep.

Just give me a quick renewal button.

By the late game I have money, Steroid has been killing people for me for weeks and neither of us needs another meeting about whether our professional relationship should continue.

There are a few other bits of strategic busywork that accumulate in the same way. None ruined the campaign, but they contribute to that feeling that the final stretch needs to get out of its own way once you've clearly mastered everything.

A few rough edges:

I also had occasional performance hiccups throughout the campaign. Nothing disastrous, but enough that I noticed them.

You can generally see where money was saved elsewhere too. This was never going to compete with a gigantic AAA production on sheer presentation, and there are places where its comparatively modest scale shows.

It rarely bothered me because the effort clearly went into the right places. I'd much rather have this mercenary roster, all the contextual dialogue and the amount of reactive quest content than another layer of expensive cinematics.

And that personality is probably the biggest reason I remained fond of it even while the late-game admin was starting to drag.

There are loads of turn-based tactical games. There aren't many where I can hire a walking Arnold parody and an endlessly horny self-aware medic, listen to them chatter while wandering around a fictional African country, spend twenty minutes modifying the squad's guns, stumble across some bizarre side quest and then resolve the next political problem by shooting several people through a wall.