Pretty decent in lieu of the horrid Brigade E5, and 7.62 High Calibre games.
Hired Guns: The Jagged Edge was Jagged Alliance 3D, but due to legal issues, and rights being pulled we got the same thing renamed. Can it live up to Jagged Alliance 2, not my favorite TBT game, but a good game nevertheless. Find out.
The story is very similar to Jagged Alliance, only in this case it's two brothers fighting over the country. One of the brothers, Janus Makonnen; leader of Diamond Shore, claims that he falsely lost the election due to dummy crimes and tweaked voting. He appeals to the U.N., already in the country for humanitarian aid purposes, but is turned down as Europe only cares that the diamond supply is flowing. With no international help in site, he appeals to your mercenary company for help, and is pointed to you.
As in JA2, the story isn't particularly strong and really serves as an excuse to lett you blow stuff up. In Hired Guns, I would argue that it's story is stronger than any other JA game because they're are multiple factions which you can influence and mess around with.
The game follows the JA2 template wholeheartedly. After starting you'll be dumped out onto the global map. Here, you'll manage squads, hire mercenaries, create your own character, manage equipment, buy weapons. The quiz (called the I.M.P. This time) is practically a clone of JA2, even the questions are the same with maybe two new ones (of course all slightly rewritten). You move troops around, and when you run into an enemy occupied zone you'll be take the tactical map.
Before I talk on the tactical map I want to discuss the first main problem with the game; the mercenaries. All the mercenaries available to you are bland, and uninteresting. There's no likeable characters persay, and the voice-acting is terrible both in it's delivery and sound quality. While JA2 went a little overboard with stereotypes, that was what made it funny and charming. Since mercenaries are the lifeblood of this game, it's rather weak.
Like JA2 there are merc incompatibilities. You don't want to hire that ex- I.R.A. Member if you have an Englishman on your team. Strangely enough though, most mercs early on flat out refuse to help you because they don't like your "ethics".What ethics? I haven't done anything yet, and the personality quiz doesn't seem to have any impact on your ethics either. For example Yamasay will only work with you if you hire his brother Castor (because your money's only good if you're famous. I mean come on, I got the money right here do you really care who's paying you!). While Castor doesn't take much convincing, he tends to be "On Assign" and thus unavailable to you. If that happens you're screwed for the game. The mercs themselves are surprisingly unskilled regardless (which contributes to the harsh difficulty), so I guess it's a moot point.
One thing Hired Guns does right with the mercs is the one-time payment system found in JA2 Unfinished Business. I never enjoyed juggling my mercs contract upkeep in JA2. Too much work when you have tons of squads, a problem easy circumvented with HG's system. One time payment system.
The tactical mode is the meat of the game and arguably the most important (If X-Com and JA2's combat stunk would you really play the management part alone?). It is fully 3D and at the start of every map you'll deploy your troops as is normal. Since most people reading this review are used to the usual TBT formula I'll skip straight to what Hired Guns does differently.
Hired Guns lacks an interesting system. While in X-Com and Silent Storm you would choose between four to five fire modes (snap shot, aimed shot, burst mode, full auto mode, sniper scope) and in Jagged Alliance 2 you would choose the exact amount of AP's to use on a shot, Hired Guns' only has two modes; standard, and maximum aiming. This lacks the amount of control you have over your characters, which is never good. There's also no indication of your hit probability (a problem repeated from JA2), which is frustrating.
The combat also lacks pizazz. The cool bullet effect of JA2 is gone, as is the moving camera to show where bullets miss. That aspect always made JA2 fights seem exciting. Graphical effects are also subdued. It would've been nice to (if necessary) forgo realism to make firearms look flashier as they fire (better muzzle flashes, smoke from the barrel). Sound is also subdued and weak. Physics are off with bodies falling backwards in a ragdoll style, but far too quickly to be entertaining. It's like they sat down at a committee and thought of all the ways to make combat look, sound, and feel "boring".
All that being said the mechanics are solid. Rather than directly aiming at body parts with the mouse, or using hotkeys Hired Guns has a system known as AimGuru which allows you to select body parts before even firing. Another nice feature is the safety prep, in which one click aims and readies the shot, and the second click causes the merc to fire. This cuts down on accidental shots, a problem in Silent Storm and I imagine any other 3D TBT game. There's also a surprising amount of conversation in the game (even more tha JA2), and depending on your stats (or the size of your wallet) it's possible to avoid certain encounters entirely. Weapons handle well and realistically. Burst mode has recoil that can easily throw off your merc's aim, and there's destructible environments (but nothing on the level of Silent Storm).
Hired Guns the Jagged Edge is a pretty decent game. Most reviews leveled against it (ironically) cite problems that existed in JA2. Hired Guns follows the template so closely it even inherited JA2's flaws. The real problem is while inheriting JA2's flaws, it failed to inherit anything that made JA2 great in spite of them. Still, if you can deal with the slightly clunky combat system (much better than these horrid systems we see in Brigade e5, 7.62, and frightfully Bitcomposer's Jagged Alliance remake; Back in Action) I'd say it's worth checking out, but have an open mind.