For some this game can be a real treat, but for most - not.
This game is for computer brainiacs, reaching to very old times, when pcs were ruled by good old turn-strategies such as Jagged Alliance. This was supposed to be a continuation of those great series but some problems law forced it to come out in a diffrent title. In the end instead of Jagged Alliance 3D we got Hired Guns.
The idea of the game did not change - we're playing a commander of a mercenary squad, who besides military skills must be good in negotiating and management. Everything is made to fade the barrier between the real world and the world in game as much as possible. In the beggening we find ourselves in a dangerious land with a map, laptop, phone and some cash.
The notebook is equipped with an imitation of an internet explorer (which is named ''Sniperilla'') which we use to look trough mercenary offers, buy weapons from dealers and get information in data base. We get e-mails from clients, reports, press information and simple spam. The hard part is to fish out the valuable information from this river, interprete them correctly and then use them. Many of the information come from diffrent sources and sometimes they disagree with eachother so many depends on the player and his deduction skills.
The authors certainly need to be praised for the amount of text in the game. They did it exactly the opposite to todays trends. Playing Hired Guns is rather like reading a book. Its a good story that seems thought trough and realistic. Somewhere deep in Africa, two brothers fight for the presidential spot, accusing each other of corruption and cheating in elections. The people are poor, while the two of them steal what they can from the country. Bandits fight with government forces, military pacifies peasants and corrupted United Nations helps military criminals escape from the country. The biggest enemy here isnt an army of orcs but simply the flaws of human nature.
Our target is to conquer this poor country and give it to the hands of who is paying. Business is business, they say. You can recruit a maximum of 6 teams with 6 mercs in each one. That is the amount that has to suffice to conquer around twenty sectors that we will find on the map of "Diamond Coast". It seems like not alot but since you will fight many times for one sector the amount of missions is fairly good. The gameplay allows the player to have alot of freedom, the game is not linear. Many things depend from the player, plus every time you fire up the game many things are generated randomly. Naturally this allows some players to abuse this to their advantage and fire up the game several times untill they have settings that are in favour for them. On the other hand there are situations where in the shop there is a machine gun but not one ammo type that fits for it or the other way around.
We steer our group in real time but when a battle starts the game changes into a turn based strategy. Thats all great but thanks to sucky pathfinding one or more of our people very often stays behind. If in that moment we meet an enemy the people that stay behind have very slim chances to catch up in turn taking mode.
The authors wanted to make the game as realistic as possible but they overdid it in many aspects. Sometimes its hilarious how someone takes a whole UZI serie on the chest and still stands like nothing happened despite the fact he just lost fifty percent of his hp. Some other time after getting hit by a meaningless scratch the guy fells down, gets up and the situation repeats itself the next turn. What the hell? Or tell me how can you just pass a comment like this: "Billy Bob injured in the head, lost 9 points of wisdom"? Clearly if we quickly dont stop the bleeding from his skull he will loose more wisdom.
I hoped that theese types of turn-based nonsenses was already buried. I was wrong. In this game bad AI orders our enemies to run blindly straight on our fighters. And our fighters kill them when the enemy can touch our guns with their shoes. Despite those serious AI bugs, the title is still quite hard on medium difficulty. Already in the beggening I got spammed with an unreal amount of granades. Ofcourse you can forget about such luxuries because on the beggening you don not have sufficient funds or possibilities.
The developer of the game proudly talked about how various objects in the game have diffrent resistance power to shooting. And truly sometimes, when you shoot in something made of wood you can here the same bullet hit something else a second later. Besides that Hired Guns does not have really thing else to be proud of from the technic side. The minimum zoom out of the camera is a pain in the ass, so is the range of sight we can see at once during battles sometimes.
The textures covering the terrain are very poor in some places, and the animation can sometimes slow (theoreticly the game does not have to sweat with math during real time gameplay). Whats worse is that the engine has problems with stability and can't even change the resolution without asking us to restart the game. You can hear some ugly melody playing in the background repeating itself again and again. It gets annoying quite fast. Some of the ''fans'' of Jagged Alliance are lifted in exstasy because of theirs favourite game's new clothes but knowing the level of todays games and strategies there really isnt anything to be excited about. In my oppinion the graphics are least to say unpleasant.
I know of the rather large group of JA fans and that rating HG a score less than 7 leaves me open for heavy fire from them. However its the XXI century and some things can't be tolerated. To be fair though, the game does greatly ressurect the old spirit of strategy-adventure games. But on the other hand with technic possibilities we have today the full of bugs Hired Guns deserves to be put in a museum.