TL;DR – Jagged Alliance: Rage is a game that struggles against itself with an unnatural level of vigour. At it’s core, it is an enjoyable turn based strategy game with a handful of relatively unique mechanics. Yet the game tries it’s best to actively frustrate you from actually enjoying it, with myriad flaws including unclear mechanics, odd balancing, poor performance, frequent crashes and the occasional bug. It’s a game I found myself enjoying in spite of… well… most of my experience. If you are patient, Jagged Alliance: Rage will give you a solid 15 to 20 hour of TBS action with some fun mechanics, tight gunfights and occasional moments of triumph in the face of horrific odds. It will also crash at inopportune times, not give you achievements you should have unlocked, and waste a lot of your time with inventory management. Would I recommend the game? The answer is both yes and no, if you are patient and enjoy the genre then by all means give Jagged Alliance: Rage as it goes on sale for a very low price. Otherwise, you will wash out of the game and think less of me by virtue of my half-hearted recommendation. Which would of course be terrible!
Quick Note: It shouldn’t matter, but I’m reviewing the Xbox One version of this game – just in case it’s AMAZING on PS4 or something.
Oh Jagged Alliance: Rage, the critics and fans of the series have not been kind to you. You were to be a spirited spin-off of a venerable classic PC series, revitalised for a new age and of course a new customer base. Yet it’s hard to find anyone who has anything nice to say about this game. Even I can’t be too nice to a game that has so many issues, that it’s honestly concerning. I try to keep my reviews relatively short, but to describe all of the flaws in Jagged Alliance: Rage would take up basically my normal quota of 5ish paragraphs (plus 5ish lovely pictures). So I’ll just rattle them off in quick succession during this deftly written opener. The game looks mediocre, runs badly, crashes every few hours, has incredibly basic writing and characterisation, wastes a ton of time on inventory management, has limited enemy variety, inconsistent mechanics, a wonky difficulty curve, weird allocation of resources, some baffling design decisions and limited enemy AI. If (and it’s a big if) you can overlook all of that then you’ll find a decent turn based strategy experience. Now I know what you’re thinking “Big Boaby how am I meant to overlook the fact that apparently everything in this game is rubbish?”
Well I’ll tell you! You see, Jagged Alliance: Rage is an incredibly rough game that desperately needed a bit more time in development. I can easily envisage a version of the game that doesn’t run bad, doesn’t crash, has a bit more tweaking with regards to the inventory, item drops and enemy AI and would therefore be pretty solid. Unfortunately in spite of my sagely wisdom, I have to acknowledge the reality which is that this is the game we got, not necessarily the game we wanted. Despite this seemingly rushed (or underfunded?) development, the game still has a solid core where you are juggling stealth and normal combat in each level. Stealth is slightly overpowered, to the point that you’ll want to use it as often as possible as it grants instant killed at no cost. However, stealth also requires you to be out of position and understand the enemy patrol routes, which often requires an odd mix of haste and patience. You need to close the gap, while remaining undetected because sneaking is an alternative form of movement which eats up action points like nobody’s business. Before continuing I should explain that Jagged Alliance: Rage is a turn based game, where you move all of your guys and then the enemy gets to move all of theirs. Each character gets around 12ish action points per turn, with movement, shooting and using items all sharing this action point pool. You’ll therefore only be able to move a maximum of 12 spaces per turn (the map is split into grids of squares) or shoot around 4 times at the absolute maximum (many weapons require 5+ AP per shot). Enemies are relatively blind, but they can react to nearby gunfire, spot bodies and of course radio in your position which triggers an alarm which causes every enemy on the map to bum-rush your last recorded position. Stealth is therefore a great way to get kills without taking damage, but it involves a great deal of risk. Now you might be tempted to skip the stealthy route, but frankly because all of the enemies share vision and some of them are snipers and they all bum-rush you – things generally don’t go well. That’s not to say your necessarily stuffed, as you can make use of sight lines or bait them by having one guy distract them while the rest of your team sneaks around to deal with the enemy commander who summons reinforcements like an absolute jerk. But with that being said, stealth is generally the best option even if the intense gunfights can be quite fun to try and figure out. Yes the odds are against you, but if you can stop the enemy from getting vision (by shooting all the guys near you) then their comrades will keep running towards you like lemmings and you’ll be able to create effective killzones.
At least until you get unlucky with the hit%, or deal with a gun jamming. Which happens all the time to a ridiculous degree. Seriously you’d think that the guns were made out of unrealised aspirations and butter for how often they suddenly melt and fall apart in the middle of combat, to the point that I’d say a gun jams every… 5ish times it’s used if fires in bursts? You barely even have to reload in this game, because when your gun jams (and it will) unjamming it also counts as reloading. Don’t worry though, as your enemies guns will jam too if they live long enough. Then again, worry some more because unjamming a gun takes a lot of AP, which means you can shoot less, which means you’ll probably get shot more. Which is bad. I suppose you can just keep looting new guns and indeed you will throughout most of the game because guns continually get better while the enemies keep getting better armour, but once you’ve got a good gun with some weapon attachments it’s a real pain in the backside. To the game’s credit, Jagged Alliance: Rage has a weirdly comprehensive variety of guns and ammunition. To it’s disservice, you’ll spend way too much time looting every single enemy to see if they have the one ammo type you need because you can’t buy, sell or otherwise trade equipment. The game was smart enough to let you loot everyone remotely once a map has been fully cleared of hostiles, but it still takes a lot of time to optimise everyone’s inventory especially in the late game when you can have 4 mercenaries at a time.
Now you might be thinking something along the lines of “well managing 4 guns doesn’t sound too bad hrurhrdudhdurr” but I’ve got news for you PAL. Because Jagged Alliance: Rage also features a bunch of quasi-survival mechanics, which require items that also take up inventory space. You need to stay hydrated (but not fed), think about bandages to heal the bleeding debuffs, have medkits and revival syringes for when you mess up a combat encounter mid-level, have weapon repair kits and armour repair kits and grenades and antibiotics if you drink the dirty water. Then there’s the fact that I picked Ivan who is cool as a character, but is an alcoholic so I also always had to have beer on hand otherwise he would be bad at shooting people. So there’s a lot of faffing around, as you’ll probably want a gun that’s decent at ranged and a gun that’s OK close up for each character, both of which probably use different ammo types, then some healing supplies and some survival supplies, before we even consider stuff like carrying grenades or whatever. Fortunately Jagged Alliance: Rage is happy to just let you focus on the combat and the inventory stuff, as the plot is very basic and consists of a series of pre-baked levels that you can do at any time – so long you’re on the right Act (of which there are 3). To access these maps the game has an overview map, which you can move across with one space taking one hour. As it takes time, you need to bring water/booze or suffer debuffs from your team being dehydrated or in withdrawal. This brings us to the day night cycle. The way it works is pretty simple, each map can be played during the day or at night. If you play at night, enemies have reduced vision and everyone except for one or two out of the 7 potentially playable characters suffers a debuff to their aiming unless they’ve got night vision goggles equipped. You might therefore be tempted to wait for night to fall upon the map, so you can sneak around better (and have the sheer thrill of shooting out the lights) but good luck. There just isn’t enough non-dirty water in the game to wait for multiple turns. Plus the game sends out patrols from enemy bases that force you into semi-randomly generated battles.
Should you stumble upon one of these patrols, you enter one small map from a pre-baked selection that will feature a bunch of enemies on two sides. You’re able to sneak behind these guys, but generally these maps are fairly easy so I often didn’t really bother and only used stealth to wrap them up. As mentioned, enemies share vision so once most of the enemy squads are dead the few remaining enemies will often have lost sight of your squad. Letting you switch back to stealth for those 1-hit instant stealth melee kills. This happens more often than you’d think, because the AI loves having one or two squad members hang back and sit in overwatch constantly. Overwatch is actually one of very few abilities that the enemy uses, although the squad leaders and commanders have an annoying rally ability which gives everyone standing near them some extra AP. So you’ll quite often have some enemies rush towards you, run out of AP, then a squad leader appears seemingly out of nowhere and lets them all shoot your exposed team member. To compensate, each of your mercenaries get some unique “rage” abilities (hence why it’s Jagged Alliance: Rage) that range from great to OK. Ivan can taunt enemies and gets passive damage resistance, Fidel can suppress enemies in an area, Dr Q has some light healing abilities and can convert rage points into extra AP and so on. To get rage you need to get adrenalin, which comes from dealing and taking damage alongside some other effects (like having the shrapnel or infection debuff or drinking alcohol). Aside from the rage abilities, basically every action is determined by what equipment you have equipped and there aren’t skill trees or anything like that.
In conclusion then, Jagged Alliance: Rage is a game with plenty of issues but a nice balance of risk reward through the effectiveness of stealth, ability of enemies to rack up the damage through large numbers and extra AP abilities and the introduction of rage abilities which require you to take and deal damage or suffer from debuffs. This keeps the game fun and frantic, aside from the admittedly large amount of time you need to spend dealing with the inventory system and survival elements. The enemy variety is fine, but by tying abilities and damage to equipment Jagged Alliance: Rage is able to scale the difficulty with each batch of maps. As for variety and the other elements of the game like the OST, visuals and so on they’re pretty lacking. The music is fine and the maps are generally varied albeit fixed, so replayability isn’t the best. It’s a shame the performance isn’t great and that the characters are so bland, but you can’t have it all. I’d therefore say that Jagged Alliance: Rage is an OK/10 game. TBS fans might have a good time if they are patient, but for genre newcomers I would recommend another game like Wargroove or XCOM: Chimera Squad.