Jagged Alliance: Rage Review

The latest in a long-running series of turn-based strategy titles, Jagged Alliance: Rage takes place 20 years after the events of the 1995 MS-DOS original and sees a group of mercenaries travelling to a tropical island. As they approach, their transport is attacked, they crash land and discover that one of their group has gone missing. An organisation of general evildoers ransacking the place and subjecting the island’s inhabitants to sadistic experiments only serve to make matters worse for the mercs.

You start off by picking two of six playable ethnic stereotypes, each with their own set of strengths and weaknesses. I chose Raven, a sharpshooter; and Dr. Q, an east Asian melee combat specialist who can also heal his teammate and perpetually seems one unfortunate slip-up away from shouting, “oh, herrow”. Once you’ve handpicked your abhorrent duo, you’re tasked with traversing the island in an attempt to locate and rescue your missing comrade.

There are some sinister goings-on within this supposed jungle paradise...

From here, Jagged Alliance: Rage presents players with an admittedly robust and deep turn-based strategy game, with options for either brute force, stealth or a mixture of the two all being viable choices in your mission. You’re able to change your stance - meaning you can creep through undergrowth or go prone in order to avoid or get the drop on enemy combatants - and Jagged Alliance: Rage is also chock full of a myriad firearms, grenades, mines and melee weapons, some of which players are able to upgrade. Each mercenary also possesses a couple of special abilities that can turn the tides of battle should you find yourself in a pinch. Taking and/or dealing damage will fill up your Rage meter and allow you to perform feats such as acquiring more action points - which govern every movement or action you take - and performing a super accurate shot that ignores enemy armour. Syringes containing an experimental drug named Bliss are also periodically on hand to give your mercs an instant refill of their Rage meters.

Eliminating the enemy threat and accomplishing the odd objective aren’t the only tasks you’ll have to contend with: a thirst meter, equipment that needs to be maintained and various ailments - such as infections, fevers and bleeding - all require close monitoring or else you’ll risk being at a huge disadvantage when taking on the island’s military presence. These conditions can all be remedied at rest spots in between missions, but even these spots offer limited refuge. As you move around the game’s overworld map, the enemy is also constantly patrolling and should your paths cross, you’ll be ambushed and need to fight them off before you can proceed. Needless to say, Jagged Alliance: Rage offers a considerable challenge, even on its standard difficulty setting.

Jagged Alliance: Rage starts off fairly easy, but things escalate quickly.

However, while Jagged Alliance: Rage has all the turn-based strategy gameplay fundamentals nailed down in theory, in its execution it’s an absolute mess, in no one area more so than its optimisation for PlayStation 4. It doesn’t run particularly well, frequently hitching whenever the camera is manoeuvred. Moving the cursor and having the game react to whatever you’re hovering over is also painfully sluggish. Positioning said cursor over, say, an enemy I wanted to loot and having it take a good two seconds for it to display the appropriate menu occurred with alarming frequency.

Additionally, I had the cursor refuse to register any inputs altogether, was unable to select any options in the pause menu, found myself pushing a button to execute an action only for nothing to happen and had the game crash on me, all on numerous occasions. Last, but certainly by no means least, it would be remiss of me not to mention the hilariously inept enemy AI, the most fantastic example being a soldier who spent a good 10 or so turns climbing up and down the same ladder of a sentry tower with little to no regard for the bullets whizzing around and into his torso.

If I starred in this game, I'd want to hide, too.

 Jagged Alliance: Rage’s technical deficiencies are coupled with a lacklustre presentation that hinders and irritates in equal measure. Uninspired and samey backdrops all sport a muddiness that makes spotting the equally drab character models all too difficult all too often, especially at night. This issue is exacerbated when attempting to locate and loot fallen soldiers whenever they’re obscured by tall grass, or trying desperately to discern their corpses from an unconscious teammate you need to carry to the extraction point before you can finish a mission. Topped off with voice overs and dialogue that would have sounded more convincing coming from Helen Keller and a soundtrack that’s utterly forgettable and generic, Jagged Alliance: Rage is neither a treat to behold nor to listen to.

Aside from the campaign, online cooperative multiplayer is also included. However, despite an infuriatingly tedious series of lengthy sessions during which I stared at the word “matchmaking” for tens of minutes at a time, I was unable to either join a match in progress or coax another player into mine. Is nobody playing Jagged Alliance: Rage? Is the matchmaking just not up to snuff? I honestly couldn’t tell you, but I can honestly tell you to not bother enduring the pain of finding out for yourself. There are enough alternatives in the turn-based strategy genre that are infinitely more playable than Jagged Alliance: Rage for me to wholeheartedly recommend that you give this game a wide, wide berth.