Jagged Alliance: Back in Action Review
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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.
