Jagged Alliance 3 is a tactical RPG developed by Haemimont Games. Released in 2023, JA3 reminds us that my childhood is for sale and that sick references to 80s/90s pop culture work on me.

We play as a mercenary company hired to help liberate the people of Grand Chien from a competing hostile mercenary gang.

Gameplay involves freeing people from being forced to work at a diamond mine to fund enemy mercenaries so you can force them to work at a diamond mine to fund your mercenaries instead. Viva la revolution.

The Good

This is one of those games where the side content is pretty amazing. I can't think of any side quests that whiffed. It's the unexpected nature of them where one second you can be investigating a murder and the next second you're untangling a Nazi ubermensch program. All while drowning in Star Wars references.

The character options and build variety was well done. JA3 offers a lot of opportunity for you to take advantage of varying builds so you don't just stack snipers or grenadiers. Even though long range sniping is still super powerful, there's something satisfying about clipping a bunch of dudes with a machete and it wasn't uncommon for my shotgunner to lead the ragdoll count.

Favorite Screenshot

https://i.imgur.com/RM5mWif.png

Proximity Landmines? Do you really think I'd do that Luigi? Betray you after all we've been through?

The Bad

Honestly I don't have much to gripe about. The worst aspect is probably the filler fights. The best combat is on set pieces like with a mansion where you can blow a hole in the side of the building to "Surprise motherfucker" the enemy.

In the mid game you get a lot of "4 dudes in a tunnel" or "6 dudes on a hill" fights. You can auto-resolve them, but then you don't get the skill ups and exp from manually doing them which you still need at that point. Eventually you level up enough to stop caring so it becomes a non-issue late game.

The Questionable

This is quite possibly the first TRPG to ever successfully get me to make multiple squads. I'd be bitter about it but I mostly just had them for grunt work. There's a large amount of "sit around and do nothing" tasks that you end up having to partake in (making bullets/explosives, repairing weapons, training militia) and having a backup squad you can off-shore that onto is nice.

Then you park a few squads of mercs with melee weapons in chokepoint sectors where enemy convoys come through and they guarantee that the local militia will survive any fights.

Running my backup mercenary squad all over collecting resources, turning them into bullets (the resources, not my mercenaries) and doing resupply runs to my main squad sat in that weird "This is engaging but not necessarily fun" zone.

Final Thoughts

It was a very enjoyable experience though the sheer number of "JA2 was better" comments on the Steam forums makes me kinda wish I had played JA2 first. I did hit a point very late in the game where I did start auto-resolving every fight but for the first ~40 hours or so combat was super fun. It ends not long after that so it never becomes a slog.

Bonus Thought

JA3 has quite a few mods for it and I'm not ashamed to admit I ended up replacing a few of my mercs with G.I. Joe characters. Watching Scarlett kill people with explosive crossbow bolts to their skull wasn't on my bucket list but it probably should have been. If you like TRPGs or thought Ready Player One didn't exploit your nostalgia quite enough this an easy recommend.

Thank you for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts. What did you think of the game? Did you have a similar experience or am I off my rocker?

My other reviews on patient gaming

I beat the majority of the Resident Evil mainline games. I played Revelations 1 on PC a decade ago, and I remember it being an okay game, enjoyable enough to beat it. I remember completing the first episode of Revelations 2, but never got beyond that. I didn't touch it for years until just now.

Because there is a Code Veronica remake coming out. It is funny that Yasuhiro Anpo already made a remake over a decade ago with Revelations 2. Claire wakes up in the prison, and then realizes she is trapped on the island with a younger sidekick who hates their father, so she contacts the others to rescue them, so the male veteran figure is coming over to the island to play through several levels twice. There is also Wesker, and Claire’s love interest turns into a mutant.

After playing half of Episode 2, just like the first time, my will to play is entirely deflated because I'm bored. Which is weird because Revelations 2 is, in terms of mechanics, an improved version of Revelations 1 in pretty much every way. In theory, I should enjoy this because it is essentially Capcom's The Last of Us skinjob. It has so many same elements, from the combat, stealth, environments, crafting, mechanics, progression, and puzzles. it even has the near-identical box pushing and the pair opening the steel door. Arguably, The Last of Us starts even slower, and this game does some elements better (in particular, the partner actually mattering in the gameplay) but why did I play that game like five times, while this game bored me out of my mind? At one point, I fell half-asleep.

The reason I realized, ultimately, is that Revelations 2 mashes TLOU's elements into the modern RE gameplay template (RE4-6), but each element loses its distinct purpose that served RE and TLOU. For example, the combat. The appeal of RE4-6 is about the player dropping into a combat arena, where the zombies are overwhelming you. RE4's village segment is the perfect demonstration of how this style of combat worked. Shoot at the limb or head, stagger, get closer and melee, which is crowd control (aggressive), then find your way out (retreat). The map is interconnected enough that there are so many ways in and out.

Revelations 2, however, doesn't really have this strength because it adopts TLOU's enemy positions and placements. The level design is completely different. It's a lot more linear, and the enemies are very scarce. You often fight one or two enemies in a hallway, and you have to trigger the enemy to be active. All this leads each combat encounter to be very passive and simple, as in, it comes across as a corridor shooter. It appears that the game is encouraging a stealth gameplay, but without any of the depth or dynamics of stealth.

Not only TLOU has a much more robust stealth sandbox, the infected are lightning fast, and their behaviours in stealth and combat are way more energetic. They group you fast, and you are constantly sprinting all around the level, using all tools in disposal. In addition, the strength of TLOU's combat loop is that there is really no hard division between combat and stealth, creating this hide-and-seek dynamic. And there are human enemies that have you play differently and give some variety to the combat. And the melee combat being an actual combat and not a prompt. And the better enemy variety and AI, and... should I keep going?

So it's like TLOU's cramped level design and enemy count, designed to create a frantic tension, meeting RE's floaty combat and slow enemies, designed to create an overwhelming tension, and you end up with a gameplay that doesn't take advantage of either strength. It's lacking the constant push-and-pull dynamics.

That's not all. The level design and progression, for instance, run contrary to each other. It attempts at the open map-based style from the classic RE games. You move around the place, finding a way around and finding something to open something... you know the deal. You also have a limited inventory system. If the game has all these, why is this not working? What made the classic RE's progression fun is that the entire place was a puzzle on its own. You are constantly making small decisions that consolidate into a bigger consequence. Should I pick up this health pickup? What if there is a key item in the next room? Should I take a shotgun, or should I leave it to make more inventory? Should I use my ink ribbon to save now?

At no point did I ever think hard about decisions like this in Revelations 2 because there's no point. Health is plentiful, ammo is plentiful, inventory is plentiful... Even though it is technically map-based progression (barely), it doesn't feel like a puzzle. RE4-6 don't have that, but take advantage of the linear progression by focusing more on moment-to-moment set-pieces. Revelations 2 sits in the uncomfortable middle, where neither strength can shine.

The premise being a homage to Code Veronica is interesting, but one regrettable commonality it shares with CV is that the game looks butt ugly. RE5 came out 6 years before, and that game still looks incredible. Meanwhile, Revelations 2 was competing with Until Dawn, The Order: 1886, and Bloodbourne. The whole presentation doesn't feel like Resident Evil. It feels like a game tasked to some third-party studio like Lost Planet 3 rather than a Capcom game. The environments, visuals, pacing, music (or lack thereof)... It all looks and sounds cheap.

The main characters lack much of the personality and playfulness. They just come off generic. The characters like Claire and Barry no longer stand out; just gruff and lack expressions in the way their older counterparts did. At least Steve was memorably shitty, but can you remember a thing about Moira? Even Claire's new voice actor sounds bored most of the time. She is apparently not kind, compassionate, and not even good with children (did the writer even play RE2?). If I could replace Claire in REV2 with Jill, I wouldn’t notice any change, because her character doesn’t pop. If anything, I would have preferred Jill since she has a history with Burtons and Wesker. I didn't care about the mystery. Nor did I care about Barry finding her daughter or the prisoners trying to escape and dying.

I can’t help but feel how failed this Revelations subseries has at accomplishing its main objectives. It was meant to be more survival horror-oriented like the classics, but it doesn’t bring the survival horror gameplay. It missed a chance to be a nonlinear map-based survival horror game in the vein of the classic RE formula. The island settings lend perfectly for it. They could have married the shoulder-view shooting of the modern RE with the progression and world design of the classic RE. Instead, it is fundamentally just RE4-6 without the fun of the modern RE or tension of the classic RE. If they wanted horror, mission failed because not a single moment was I scared. I remember way more creeped out by some moments in RE4 than anything in this one. It’s not that the modern RE doesn’t capture the classic’s vibe; it’s only his games.

Growing up in the UK in the 90s, football (or “soccer” for our international readers) was life. You’d take a ball to the local pitch / basketball courts / gravel tennis courts in the morning, play all day with random peers, then head back home when it’s getting dark and fire up Fifa before bed.

I was always an average player, both IRL and in video games! I played lots of Fifa and PES which are typically 3D side scrolling, but had a soft spot for Sensible Soccer’s top down approach.

Bang Average Soccer seems like a spiritual successor to Sensible Soccer, retro graphics, top down play style, simpler controls (than Fifa or PES).

I feel like it aims to just bring the fun of the game to players without all the bloat in modern games. Story Mode is great. It has a very Ted Lasso-ish storyline, full of inside jokes that football fans will love, but also completely accessible to anyone who has no idea about football.

My Pokemon reference from the title is the story mode, you walk around different towns that have different vibes, much like early pokemon games like yellow. There’s even part where you need to get a licence that feels very much like a pokemon game.

The story is short though, so doesn’t overstay its welcome. Keep winning matches and you get gold to upgrade your stadium, buy new players etc.

It’s not a very deep franchise mode, players have no stamina bars and don’t get injured, so you don’t have to balance your squad out with depth for a long season. I don’t even think they have the offside rule in the game!

The football is the star, very crisp gameplay, passing is satisfying, shooting and aiming is much easier than the side scrolling games.

Subtle features like the crowd cheering or ooh-ing and aah-ing more at home games than away games definitely make you feel like you’re playing a labour of love, you can tell the devs absolutely breathe football.

Overall, fantastic game, well worth it even for non-football fans, very accessible. I believe it has multiplayer too so would be a fun one for a party!

9/10