Jagged Alliance: Rage announced, continues doodling on the corpse of the series

For those unfamiliar with the first two Jagged Alliance games, they were brutally difficult, turn-based squad-focused strategy games where you used money from completing missions and holding onto territory (essentially the maps you've beaten) to hire colorful mercenaries from a wide pool of candidates, some of whom liked to work together, some of whom would murder another character leaving you hoping you created a backup save before your latest batch of hirees. It featured semi-realistic settings, semi-realistic guns, and was a great counterpart to the more sci-fi focused X-Com.

Ever since, there's been a proud tradition of small developers yanking open the drawers of the gaming morgue to pull the Jagged Alliance license out from time to time so they can parade the rotting corpse to irritable old-timers like me who then buy their product, play it for five minutes, and then go find a punching bag for the next day and a half. Instead of replicating the series' formula for greatness, these devs invariably try to "modernize" things with half-assed actiony gameplay that has no business in or near what was essentially a turn-based shoot-em-up chess game. Toss in incomprehensible UIs built by what I'm sure were torture specialists in some backwoods gulag and you've got the last twenty years of Jagged Alliance games.

You'd think by now someone would pick up the license and try to make a decent, ya know, Jagged Alliance game, but here we are in yet another year of our Lord Dolla Dolla Bill and yet another developer is putting their own "spin" on the formula in Jagged Alliance Rage. Just... look, I guess. Be warned, old-timers like me. You're gonna want a goddamn cistern of grampy's happy juice and possibly a couple of prostitutes to help cheer you up after what might be the briefest of brief looks at the gameplay.

It doesn't look worse than the last half dozen or so Jagged Alliance things we've gotten as fans, but that's like being grateful your prostate exam wasn't like the last one done by Edward Scissorhands. Who, by the way, is not a real doctor, no matter what the paper on his wall says. FYI.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Jagged Alliance: Rage! (and drag that fucking pucntuated title over a field of broken glass, please) will be the great godsend to the series I've been hoping for for twenty years. But holy hell, it looks like just more of the same, and more of the same means a constant, soul-crushing disappointment in whoever's bought out the Jagged Alliance name this week for a romp in the rotting, shit-smelling hay.

Jagged Alliance really should have stopped with 2. It’s the pinnacle of squad based tactical combat games.

And yeah this looks bad.

I think your reaction to a new Jagged Alliance game is probably similar to how I feel whenever Ubisoft announces a new Might and Magic thing, with optimism long yielded to pervasive cynicism. While their attempt at a Might and Magic X was alright, the Heroes side of things is basically a flaming crater at this point.

Have any of these “modern” JA games just been a turn-based thing? Even as someone with little-to-no affinity for the series, these Euro-developed remakes and reboots have always seemed like pretty dire missteps. But, uh, they keep making them. Are there any indie throwbacks trying to recreate those old game in the same way as something like Xenonauts?

@arbitrarywater: Hard West is the closest thing I can think of, but even that's a pretty far stone's throw away. JA: Online comes closest in terms of stuff that came out after 2, not counting the fan-made JA2 games (which in all honesty are pretty solid), but only on a surface level.

EDIT: I'm also pretty irritated with the weird directions Might and Magic has gone over the years, but X looks solid (and is one of the games I keep installed for the time when I finally actually dive into it).

Meh, i liked JA: Back in Action a lot.

I half suspect this JA:Rage to be a clone of the modern X-Com: Enemy Unknown so i don't expect it to be much more than a half hearted cash grab.

I just want another Silent Storm. A turn based strategy game with a state of the art physics engine.

Yeesh, why do they even bother. The IP holder continues to not have a single clue of what to do with this series.

I should probably play JA2 again - I never have finished it, though I adore the first 5/6ths of that game. I'm actually itching to go back and play the first one again some day.

Hard West is one of those games I've heard nothing but lukewarm things about, and I'm past the point where I feel the need to check out every single tactics thing on the market (at least, assuming that tactics thing isn't a weird DOS game from 1996, but that's my sickness.) For as much as I've been assured that "it's the best time to be playing video games" and that crowdfunded titles and indies are bringing back all of those old games and genres I like, there's still something to be said as far as breadth and variety is concerned. Sure, there are some pretty damn solid tactics games from the last few years, but I find it a little baffling no one has tried making their own "spiritual successor" take on JA, or even Silent Storm for that matter.

If you ever get around to it, Might and Magic X is a solid effort, even if its low budget and limited resources are painfully obvious at times. I'm not sure if I'm as willing to stand by it as I was in 2014 (where I have to imagine my enthusiasm was partially informed by the idea that someone, somewhere, still cared enough about the Might and Magic RPGs to try and make a new one) but it still stands out in my mind partially because there still aren't a ton of modern throwback RPGs doing stuff in that style; another parallel to Jagged Alliance, I suppose.

@arbitrarywater: I think as tools become more and more accessible, we're likely to see more indie devs develop games outside of the five billionth platformer/Metroidvania/roguelike/retro shooter genres. Or so I hope, anyways. I think we're most likely to see something like Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games make a resurgence, where someone develops a good toolkit to let people make their own scenarios and campaigns instead of fully fleshing out their own. I'm not exactly opposed to that notion.

Thought of this and didn't want to double post - Omerta isn't the worst turn-based squad game out there either. It's very basic in principle and nothing is quite as deep as I'd like, but I had quite a bit of fun with it.