![]() ![]() There's plenty of room for future playthroughs with options like the Iron Man-style "Dead is Dead" mode that auto-saves every time someone dies, and "To the Bitter End" that disallows saving in combat altogether. And there were enough maps that threw some kind of wrench into my plans, like an enormous pit mine or a heavily fortified prison, that no two firefights felt exactly the same. Leveling up gives you a choice of perks based on your stats, though I found that there weren't enough of these that are really useful to my playstyle, so I ended up taking the same ones on most of my squad, regardless of specialization.Įven when I had a team of hardened doom snipers and was clearing enemy encampments with brutal efficiency, the pacing evened out to be satisfying. That can be clutch, since headshots deal a lot more damage and getting hit in the hand or the leg can impair your aiming and movement, respectively. Armor can be decked out with ceramic plates that negate the first few hits taken to a specific body part. These might give you bonuses to aimed shots or a higher critical chance. For instance, dismantling items gives you components that can be used to craft useful weapon mods. There are plenty of other options for merc progression, though. That helped the feeling that everyone on the team had a specific job, even if I built them all pretty similarly combat-wise. It's also important to have at least one explosives expert and one tech nerd along in case you need to disarm a booby-trapped container or steal some classified data from a Windows ME laptop. My favorite involved getting a street gang of homicidal old ladies back together, which at one point required me to hire someone with the Psychopath trait in order to relate to their most reluctant former member. Almost every town has an interesting side quest or two, rewarding you with increased loyalty and income. There's plenty to do as you fight across the Grand Chien map as well, from securing critical diamond mines that let you keep paying your mercs and prevent them from deserting, to training local militias so you don't have to be everywhere at once when periodic enemy raids target your settlements, or simply enjoying some R&R to keep everyone in good spirits and thus maximum combat effectiveness. And that's not really how a modern firefight works. The only way to effectively cover someone trying to move up, a lot of the time, is to outright kill everyone shooting at them. This meant that it felt unnecessarily difficult to use conventional move-and-fire tactics with my rifle team, which led to some really awkward tactical situations. Single-shot and even burst-fire weapons don't usually suppress enemies at all, even if you have multiple mercs firing on the same target. It's hard to have a dedicated machine gunner because you can't just buy ammo with cash outside of a few places that have a very limited supply, and automatic weapons chew through that precious supply hungrily. ![]() One thing that did bug me a bit is the way suppression works. You don't have strategic independence to go pursue objectives in different sectors simultaneously, though, so you'll have to stick together. Jagged Alliance 3 features a drop-in/drop-out co-op mode for two players that allows you each to hire and control your own squad of mercs from a common pool of funds. Livewire, my hacker, is written as an almost exasperating stereotype of a snarky college student, but her practicality occasionally opened up some new options for me in quest dialogue when I had her on my team. He's not even supposed to be here today! But his character trait causes him to make the whole squad feel inspired when he makes a tough shot and is surprised by his own competence. My Canadian medic, Michael "M.D." Dawson's whole schtick is that he's very timid and self-conscious. While I might not have always found the archetypes they were based on especially entertaining, I did like that they weren't just an endless procession of mostly indistinguishable grunts. One area where Jagged Alliance has always differed from its cousins like XCOM is that most of the available mercs are pre-written characters instead of blank slates, and come with a distinct personality and visual style. ![]()
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