Jagged Alliance 2

Jagged Alliance 2 is a squad tactics game set on Arulco, a fictional island country ruled by a queen named Deidranna. A client wants the country taken back, and you are the contractor. You do not command an army. You command whoever you can afford. Mercenaries are hired through an in-game website run by the Association of International Mercenaries, and from a rival agency called M.E.R.C. Each one is a named individual with a fee, a set of skills, and a temperament. The money to pay them comes from the island itself, from mines you have to capture first.

The game runs on two layers. On the strategic map, Arulco is a grid of sectors. You move squads between them, assign mercenaries to jobs such as repairing gear, treating wounds, or training locals, and watch the calendar, because contracts run out and need renewing. Enter a sector and the game drops into the tactical map, where the clock runs in real time while you explore. Once an enemy is spotted, play switches to turns. Each character has a limited number of action points to spend on moving, aiming, shooting, or reloading, and then the other side takes its turn.

The first Jagged Alliance, released in 1995, already built its campaign around hiring mercenaries. The sequel is where that idea became a cast. Each mercenary has an attitude, a history, and others they get along with or cannot stand. Those who like each other have higher morale. Those who do not complain often, and eventually one of them quits. Mercenaries also comment aloud in the field, and the humor of those lines became a trademark of the series. Tactics games had long given soldiers names. This one gave them opinions.

It also wrapped a campaign around the fights. Arulco is a map of sectors, and the island is liberated one sector at a time. Captured mines pay a daily income once the local miners are loyal, and that income pays for mercenaries, equipment, and everything else. Local citizens can be trained into militia who defend a sector after the squad has left it, which lets the player move on from a place that is already won. Winning a fight is only half the work. The other half is deciding what the win is for.

Its interrupt system answered an old weakness of turn-based combat, where one side can only watch while the other moves. If a combatant has action points left and spots an enemy during the enemy's turn, there is a chance to break in and act. X-COM had automatic reaction fire in 1994, so the idea was not new, but here the player makes the call. A community project called 1.13 adds items, features and a multiplayer mode, and it is still being updated. A game from 1999 that still has maintainers is making its own argument for the design.

Jagged Alliance 2 fights in turns. RAD Tactics is real time with pause, so most of its rules do not apply to ours, and we are not trying to remake it. What carries over is the problem it solved. Any squad tactics game has to make the player care whether one particular soldier lives. Any that runs past a single battle also has to make its fights feel connected. Jagged Alliance 2 shows that both can be done in a game about cover, aim, and range.

The lesson we take is about weight. Soldiers who have a voice and a history are remembered, and soldiers who are interchangeable are replaced without a thought. A squad tactics game can be read as a puzzle about positions, and the best of them can also be read as a story about people. We want the second reading to be there for anyone who looks for it. That is a statement of lineage and intent, not a description of any system in RAD Tactics.

The moment we keep coming back to is small. The squad is doing well and the mine is paying. Two of the mercenaries you hired because they were good have started complaining about each other. Nothing on the map has changed, and the squad already feels different. You can see the choice coming: keep both and watch morale slip, or let one go before the game takes the decision for you.

Then there are the files. A demolitions expert in the M.E.R.C. roster comes cheap, and the biography is frank about why: a long history of drug trouble and rehab that did not last. You hire the person anyway, because the price is right and the skill is real, and for the rest of the campaign you are quietly deciding how far to trust them. That is a lot of character for a few lines of text and a small portrait.