Jagged Alliance: Rage! - Released

Jagged Alliance: Rage! is has been released:

Jagged Alliance: Rage!

Jagged Alliance is back - With a new take on turn-based tactics, adventure elements and the well-known quirky mercenaries!

Set 20 years after the first Jagged Alliance, this spin-off lets you experience a road trip into a jungle hell to test your mind and body to the limits!

This time it's just you and a few allies versus an entire island ruled by a drug overlord and his crazed army.

Constantly on the brink of breakdown, faced with dehydration and no support from home, you lead a team of seasoned mercenaries against vastly outnumbering armed forces.

Use tactical brilliance and guerilla tactics to destroy their structures and strengthen the island's population to take back what is rightfully theirs.

Do you have what it takes to rise to old glory?

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Features:

• 2 Player online co-op mode
• Deep turn-based tactical gameplay mixed with adventure elements
• Choose a variety of tactics ranging from stealth to brute force
• Strong character personalities with own skills, desires and personal conflicts
• Rage skills: Unique character abilities that get more powerful over the course of the battle
• Powerful Commanders coordinate enemy troops on the battlefields
• Face terrifying experimental drugs and use them to manipulate your enemies

More information.

…I wish this interested me. But no.

So anyone brave enough to play this and share their opinion?

Not me. I'm just not that brave nowadays!

Not i but been reading the steam reviews. Havent' seen anything hugely negative (despite the overall rating); mostly complaints are not really ja; maps are small; game (combat) is horribly simplified; overall mechanics simplified… Basically it sounds like a simply whack em game with minimalistic complexity and tiny maps ?

Originally Posted by you
Not i but been reading the steam reviews. Havent' seen anything hugely negative (despite the overall rating); mostly complaints are not really ja; maps are small; game (combat) is horribly simplified; overall mechanics simplified… Basically it sounds like a simply whack em game with minimalistic complexity and tiny maps ?

WHAT??! Simplified combat? OK. Avoiding this one..

It is streamed.

The trailer carefully avoided to show the enemy: for one reason, the AI is shockingly bad.

Could have been decent without that flaw.

One map: 20 hostiles, 10 hostages. Looks promising as it might have set a stage for failure. After attempting infiltration, player got spotted at 18 hostiles left.
First few turns afterwards, the AI looked able to focus on dispatching hostages. Up to a count of five. So no failure.

The AI does not know how to flank, spread or stack. The whole combat was solved by keeping cover on a high ground position (two characters only) placed one next to the other. The enemy grouped so grenades were meant easy. Just trading shots until zero hostiles.

AI is too bad actually to cement the use of abilities.

This game in no way makes me want to play it more than the old JA2. Someone, convince me otherwise.

I don't think anyone is going to convince you of anything….

Originally Posted by Capt. Huggy Face
This game in no way makes me want to play it more than the old JA2. Someone, convince me otherwise.

Originally Posted by you
I don't think anyone is going to convince you of anything….

I can be convinced. I'm very impressionable

It sucks. It's super "lite". Not Jagged Alliance as we know it.

Well I enjoyed the last three games so…..Guess I'll buy this on a cheap sale.

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
Well I enjoyed the last three games so…..Guess I'll buy this on a cheap sale.

Which three where they?

JA property has had so many developers that it's hard to keep track of it.

JA: Rage is made by the same people who did JA: Online and not the people who did "back in action" and "crossfire". "flashback" was by a different dev again.

Reading the list, it appeared that the one with RTwP combat was the closest to expand on JA2. That before players decided to remove the rug from beneath devs'feet because it had to be UgoIgo.

Result: they got served, all the following products were UgoIgo and the last one failed to deliver basic UgoIgo gameplay features.

Like servant, like master.

Originally Posted by Capt. Huggy Face
This game in no way makes me want to play it more than the old JA2. Someone, convince me otherwise.

It could be played for less than an hour, and possibly less than JA2.

Already remarked: that is setting the bar way too high relatively to the situation at hand.

This product could be a decent game worth playing even when not matching JA2's level. There was room to be decent below the JA2's bar.

Obviously, after all these years, a successor that would expand on JA2's gameplay should have happened.

It did not happen. But this product could have been a decent game. It went the UgoIgo way and failed to get a few core features right like taking advantage of outnumbering the player (UgoIgo 101)

I have to agree with Chien. BiA was the remake that came closest to capturing the JA2 feeling, and I really liked the RTwP system they came up with, where you could plan and sync different actions, and then watch it all play out without need for constant pausing.

What ruined that game (for me) was the atrocious scaling, in the end game every enemy was a bullet sponge that could take ridiculously many hits and there were obscene numbers of them in every fight. I had really fun up until that point though.

Originally Posted by TomRon
I have to agree with Chien. BiA was the remake that came closest to capturing the JA2 feeling, and I really liked the RTwP system they came up with, where you could plan and sync different actions, and then watch it all play out without need for constant pausing.

You should try 7.62. With Blue Sun mod.

The thing simulates hand grenade shrapnel trajectories individually. Has barrier penetration and suppression mechanics, adrenalin etc.

I spent hours just screwing around with rifles. Looking at ballistic profiles and aiming penalties etc.

Bought it and I am playing it right now. Enjoying it quite a lot!

Just kidding.

Well…not regarding the buying and playing part…

I am fine with it not being a "Proper Jagged Alliance Game".

Limited Scope? Ok to me, if this helps to focus on the available content.
Different Graphics Style? Also fine to me if it has some personality.

What the game lacks the most is actually polish.
I only played for 7h so far. But the game just feels horrible. The controls are really bad. Not in terms of bad interface design or something (well, that as well) or bad hotkey assignments (btw you cannot change them). The issue is mostly with responsivness.
Your turn begins and you want to walk with your character. Sometimes it takes seconds until the movement grid displays. You want to shot an opponent, sometimes it doesn't display the shooting action. Then you must click on the shooting option instead of the enemy and then tab through the enemies. Sometimes loot icons don't appear. And speaking of looting: the looting is the worst looting experience I can remember in any game.
The game does not switch to real time after the combat ends. Instead "far looting" is activated: you can loot everything on the map without moving there.
But you have no option to highlight lootable objects. Now you are playing a memory and hidden object game. Do you remember where you killed everyone? Do you find all the chests and items on tables in the room you can loot? Have fun mousovering them!

And once you found it, have fun sorting through them. Besides of your equipment each character can carry items in 6 slots (which can be slowly expanded). And you have a stash of another 14 slots in your "camp" which you cannot access during a "mission" (meaning when you loot stuff). Rifles and armor take up 2 slots btw. And you can only stack stuff up to 4 units (ammo up to 50). It's an absolute mess. Basically you are frigtened when ending the combat that now the looting part begins, and you will spend the next 20 minutes searching and managing items.
There was already lots of item management in Jagged Alliance 2. But there you were managing over 10 soldiers and sectors with dozens if not hundreds of items. In JA Rage you get a worse experience with just 2 Characters (guess they will be more) and just 20-30 items in total.

Oh, btw: After about 15-20 shots your items are also so damaged in durability that they need to be repaired if you want to continue using them. So if you don't want to repair them you can also have lots of fun looking for items with better durability among the corpses.

In addition I had the problem when I loaded a game today that I could not restart a mission. Basically I was forced to savescum and continue my latest save.
I liked that you could not save/load during combat in JA1 and was happy that this was re-introduced with "Ironmanmode" in Jagged Alliance 2 Gold.
In JA Rage you can save/load during combat however you want. And having the "restart mission"-option randomly greyed out is basically incentivising you to do so.

I think JA Rage could have been a decent game, if they polished the interface more (well, maybe it's broken beyond repair) and completely revamped the item system.

It looks like the kind of game that should have had another name.