Jagged Alliance 3 Is a Serious Tactics Game With a Tone That Doesn’t Match | Jagged Alliance 3(2023)
440Even as a big fan of tactics games, I missed out on 1999's Jagged Alliance 2, which is often talked about as a high point in the genre. So going into Jagged Alliance 3, the upcoming sequel landing almost a quarter century later, I wasn't too sure what to expect. What I found in the first several hours, though, is a rewarding, squad-based battlefield with tense resource management – and deliberately schlocky throwback humor that sometimes clashes with the tone of the gritty, grounded conflict that serves as its backdrop.
The mission starts off pretty simple. You're the leader of a mercenary unit hired to drop into a hot zone in a fictionalized African country where the sitting government is in conflict with a paramilitary led by a mysterious figure known as 'The Major.' You'll assemble your team from a list of dozens of pre-made guns for hire with various specializations, from medics to mechanics to sharpshooters. Some of them even know each other and have strong opinions on their fellow mercs. In one case, Fox here wouldn't even join my team because she didn't want to work with Bobby "Steroid" Gontarski. And I don't entirely blame her.
This is where some of that tonal whiplash comes in. The cast of hireable mercs seems to draw from cheeseball 80’s action movies, with "Steroid" being a fairly extreme example. He's cartoonishly violent and arrogant, like a dollar-store Duke Nukem, and even has a special ability that's basically a superhero punch. You know, if the fact that his codename is "Steroid" didn't already tell you everything you need to know. And that, by itself, wouldn't exactly bug me, except that it's in stark contrast to the much more realistic tone of the campaign, which has the character of a complex civil war ripped from the headlines. It seems like Jagged Alliance 3 wants to be a goofy popcorn blockbuster and a somewhat nuanced tale of realistic conflict, and those don't always play well together.
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