Gameplay

Glocked

At its core, JA2: Unfinished Business is like any good squad game. You have your small group of men, you fight in turns with your movement/shooting capabilities limited by action points. With these points, you can move, shoot, turn and even lower your stance. Characters can stand - which makes them big targets but they get very mobile; they can crouch - at some cost in mobility; or they can drop and crawl and suffer huge penalties to movement. These three positions are complemented by a 'stealth' mode which slows characters down even further, but reduces the chance of detection by an enemy.

That's right, get up and make yourself a bigger target

Dumbass

To save some of the tedium often involved in squad games, Jagged Alliance is real-time until an enemy is spotted or an enemy spots you. Then the game switches to turn-based mode, much like Fallout. This setup, however, isn't perfect. In real-time mode you can still only move one man at a time - by the time you're done giving orders to all your troops, the first to be told to move somewhere already has a huge lead on his fellows. This is rather disconcerting, since that means that your lead man often gets stranded by himself when first spotted by the enemy, until the rest of the men can catch up. Unfortunately, since the game is now in turn-based mode, this takes some time. A group-movement option would be greatly appreciated.

Editor's Update 2/12/01: The manual says you can simply drag select for group movement. This didn't work on Jakub's computer and still does not. One helpful reader pointed out an undocumented feature. Pressing the '=' button will select all mercs for group movement.

Wolf's a softie at heart

First aid

Tactical combat is quite excellent, comparable to Fallout, Squad Leader or X-Com. However, it does have a few features that are more like necessities. The most obvious and glaring problem is the matter of aim. You select a trooper, target an enemy, and fire. This should produce the quite desireable result of actually hitting your foe. Unfortunately, the default firing mode never does. After 3 hours of trying to get past the first stage in the game, I finally figured out the trick - you need to spend extra action points to 'take aim'. Up until I remembered this trick from Deadly Games, I was getting out-hit at a 5:1 ratio and outdamaged at least 2:1 per hit. What's the point of a gameplay 'option' when it's really a necessity?

CnC command and control

Unfinished Business, like all Jagged Alliance games, has an extensive strategic campaign. You must liberate towns, mines, the surrounding areas and take advantage of the resources they give you. Mercenaries must be hired, re-hired or even replaced. Militia must be trained to guard these areas, captured weapons must be sold to maintain an operating budget, and quests must be completed. You have to watch your troops' skills progress, and train them as necessary, or let them practice the skills in real-life.

Mac-10! The weapon of the l33t in Counterstrike!

Limpin' home

Quests in JA2:UB work like they did with its predecessor. When talking to various characters, somewhere in their dialogues they'll drop hints on what's going on, or what they want, or who's in trouble. Sooner or later you'll encounter a situation where you can take advantage of that information and make a profit.

The game has a remarkably deep, long and satisfying single player campaign, which makes up for the fact that the game is single player only. This campaign is not perfect, however. Difficulty levels are quite high, even at the Novice setting. Play can get quite tedious in big fights, as more and more troops are involved, so more and more waiting for your turn takes place, as you watch militia and the enemy engage each other, before you can finally move.