Jagged Alliance 2

released on Jul 23, 1999

Jagged Alliance 2 is a perfect blend of strategy, roleplaying and tactical combat. With dozen of new weapons, 150+ individual in-game characters, realistic combat physics and more than 10,000 lines of digitalized speech. Welcome to the killing grounds!


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This is one of those games that are part of the peak of their genre. The fact that it's unsurpassed to this day either means it's impossibly good, or that modern vidya is afraid of truly trying.
If you're new don't play 1.13 with the extra guns and the counterattack.

Completed it for 5-6 times? Masterpiece tactics

Jagged Alliance 2 is a great example of a lightning-in-a-bottle situation, where a team of ambitious developers with a similar mindset of “wouldn’t it be cool if we put this in?”, wanted to make a game during the tail-end of the wild west of 90s PC gaming. They brainstormed all their best ideas together, alongside their love of different games and various media, resulting in one of the most engaging and organic feeling turn-based strategy RPGs that oozes a lot of personality and charm.

The beauty behind Jagged Alliance 2 is how straightforward the core objective is and how everything is built around it. Eliminate the tyrannical despot Queen Deidranna and liberate the nation of Arulco. How you go about completing this objective is up to you. From the beginning, you’re given a sum of cash, a laptop full of resources, intel, and websites to recruit a variety of colorful mercenaries from across the world. You can go slow and deliberate, capturing every sector in Arulco to weaken the Queen’s defenses while building up your battalion of mercs and Arulco’s rebel natives. You can also go fast and strike before the Queen even knows you’ve arrived in Arulco, carefully navigating from the north of the country to the capital in the south, blowing up the walls and somehow evading the entire army as you neutralize the Queen in her bedroom. This idea extends to everything else in the game, where quests are only marked with notes, and the solution to them is up to you.

There’s a fantastic sense of adventure and discovery, where there’s always something to find that makes each sector of Arulco a worthwhile exploration. To give an example with slight spoilers - one of my favorite questlines is meeting a mob boss who controls a city in the north side, and wants me to steal a grail for him that’s in a museum located farther south in the country. I already secured the city that has the museum, so it was just a matter of me getting someone sneaky and stealing the grail. I took him back to the mob boss, gave him the grail, and accepted a hefty sum of cash to help me out further into my journey of liberating Arulco. Hours later I secured a village and talked to one of the locals, who maintains a culturally significant ancient site nearby. He tells me they’ve been missing a grail that had been an important part of the land’s ancestral history. I felt bad that I had already given the grail to the mob boss, but I didn’t want to reload a save as I'd already made hours of progress since then. So, I went ahead and went back to the mob boss, assuming there was a way to talk to him again about the grail. He spat me the same lines after I gave him the grail, which is to enjoy the money and spend it in his city’s establishments. The whole city was surrounded by his goons, so it’s going to be a tough fight. But I went ahead and positioned my squad to advantageous points and fought them all. To my surprise, the grail was still in the mob boss’ corpse. I picked it up, gave it back to the village guy, and gained a positive reputation with the people of Arulco. As a bonus for my trouble, I even found a secret stash in the mob boss’ mansion leading underground into an abandoned mine and gained even more cash. The game is full of neat organically designed quests like this, and again the idea of leaving you to your own devices on how you resolve them.

The combat is straightforward, solid, and feels very lethal. Instead of showing the chance to hit and damage of your attacks like in most turn-based combat games, JA2 only suggests you the optimal range of your weapon. This results in less number crunching and min-maxing the situation, and encourages the player to take risks and go with their gut feeling. You can use action points to aim your weapon increasing the likelihood of hitting your shot. Do you take the risk of a farther headshot to dispatch a dangerous armored enemy ASAP? Or do you go for the safer option, where you move a bit closer, shoot unaimed toward his torso, and hope it’ll slow him down so you can assess your options in the next turn?

Going further into the lethality of combat, even a leg shot can incapacitate someone, making armor and first-aid very important. Just getting someone to bleed and not have medical assistance within the next turn can put them out of commission easily. Not to mention burst and full auto fire have separately calculated hits, making even just a single stray bullet hit dangerous, with a full hit practically a guaranteed kill. I love how the number crunching overall feels very natural. Stats and numbers give you an idea of the capabilities of mercs and weapons but are designed to keep things grounded and consistent where a bullet is a bullet, a knife’s a knife, and point-blank range even with the worst shot in the world can explode someone’s head with a shotgun. Not to mention explosives, which there are a variety of as well, coupled with destructible environments. It’s all very exciting, chaotic and fun.

Then we have the strategic layer of the game wrapping all of the other elements together. Logistics and budget management are all critical, alongside making sure your band of mercs doesn’t kill each other. You aren’t just going to have to consider the abilities of your mercs, you also need to learn their personalities, history, disabilities, prejudices, and so-and-so. Having a couple of exes for example that had a bitter break up might kill each other when you have them in the same sector, and it isn’t exactly great for morale if you pair up the racist in a squad of racially diverse people. On the flip side, you’ll also have long-time friends or potential friends build up their bonds and become an even stronger synergy beyond whatever their stats are. It’s all wonderfully designed, and you’ll be spending equal time in combat as you with the strategic management, as you make sure your weapons are repaired, mercs patched up, and well rested while making sure the Queen’s army doesn’t take back the sectors you have liberated.

All of this is presented in a campy pastiche of 80s and 90s action movies that’s a lot of fun, while also managing to keep serious moments grounded, including the potential deaths of your mercs and other characters. It’s all fantastic and strikes a nice balance between tonal shifts.

I already liked JA2 back when I first played it around the mid-2000s, but recently replaying it and giving it a more in-depth playthrough alongside the experience of playing more games throughout the years gave me a newfound appreciation of how wonderful this game is. My motivation to replay throughout the series started after finding out JA3 was released, and I even ended up delaying playing that because as soon as I finished JA2 again, I went straight for a replay onto the hardest difficulty level. JA2 shot up immediately as one of my all-time favorites in general.

If any of this piqued your interest, you may have come across the common suggestion of playing with the 1.13 mod. I highly recommend not doing this on your first playthrough. 1.13 itself is an amazing project, but it overhauls the game a whole lot, being a labor of love that was worked on since 2005 and is still being worked on to this day. But even when you read through the new features and settings and make it as close to the vanilla game as possible, it’s still very different and is just overwhelming overall to get through when you don’t have a first-time experience of the game. I instead suggest playing it vanilla using the JA2 Stracciatella source port which makes it run nicer on modern systems alongside some bug fixes.

There still hasn't been a game that comes close to this, the guns, the characters, the tactics. Has so much charm but is unfortunately a little dated even though it's still fun, hopefully the third game is finally a worthy game after all these years and failed sequels