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Brigade E5: New Jagged Union Impressions - First Look

Will this upcoming tactical game be the successor to the cult classic Jagged Alliance 2? Get the details here.

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Some years ago, we said farewell to a small but well-loved Canadian game developer known as Sirtech as the company quietly bowed out of the game industry. The company had created one of the premier computer role-playing series, Wizardry, as well as a series of challenging tactical strategy games known as Jagged Alliance. The Jagged Alliance series earned a small but fiercely loyal following of fans the world over and seemed like it was on its way to a comeback with Canadian publisher Strategy First, but things just didn't work out. While Sirtech remains on the sidelines, Strategy First has signed with Russian publisher 1C to bring Brigade E5: New Jagged Union--a new tactical game that seems an awful lot like Jagged Alliance 2--stateside. In fact, this upcoming game might as well be a warm-up, since Strategy First will also eventually publish Jagged Alliance 3 (though we won't see that one for a while).

You can equip your mercenaries with the finest weapons money can buy.
You can equip your mercenaries with the finest weapons money can buy.

Brigade E5, despite its unusual name, will have much in common with Jagged Alliance 2, which was itself a tactical game in which you led a band of mercenaries in a desperate bid to depose the corrupt dictator of a tiny underdeveloped island nation. Brigade E5 will offer a lengthy single-player game with a very similar premise, but with a new, fully 3D engine that will let you rotate, pan, and zoom your camera view to get a better view of the action. You'll begin the game with a single character with various skills and abilities, and you'll equip yourself at the local shop by spending cold hard cash. The same cold hard cash can be used to recruit mercenaries to your cause, some of whom you may find standing around the area looking for work.

You'll also use a "paper doll" inventory system, similar to the one in Jagged Alliance 2, to equip your characters with body armor, extra ammunition clips, and a wide variety of different firearms, including handguns, submachine guns, and sniper rifles, among others. In true Jagged Alliance fashion, you'll even be able to make minor modifications to your equipment, like using duct tape either to attach multiple ammo clips to each other or to add scopes to your guns for added accuracy. However, you can't necessarily go overboard in buying piles of junk for your teammates, since every item has a weight value, and carrying too much weight will slow them down.

Just like with Jagged Alliance, you'll play Brigade E5 from two primary perspectives--either from a tactical map of the land, which you'll advance across with time compression, or from a zoomed-in map of the area, which you can use to manually control your team of mercenaries. (It just so happens that the island nation you must liberate in the game is about as big as Jagged Alliance 2's Arulco.) Your hired guns can walk, run, crouch, and lie prone, as well as strafe to the side or roll to the side while lying prone. These are all handy abilities, but once things hit the fan, you'll really need to depend on your soldiers' aim, stealth, and throwing arm for grenades (and their medic skills, heaven forbid).

Some engagements call for finesse. From the looks of it, this isn't one of them.
Some engagements call for finesse. From the looks of it, this isn't one of them.

Rather than featuring a turn-based system, Brigade E5 will use a real-time engine that can be optionally set to pause the game whenever specific actions are taken. Apparently, if you set all major events to autopause, such as firing weapons and sighting enemies, you'll essentially have a turn-based game that will give you as much time as you need to plan your next moves. Like in Jagged Alliance 2 from 1999 and other tactical games since then, your characters will have a limited number of action points they can use to change their position, advance on the enemy, fire, reload, or toss grenades. We watched an extremely tough battle against a small group of enemy soldiers holed up in a bank as they took a knee to fire steadier shots at our invading group. Like in other tactical games, you'll take penalties in battle when attempting to fire on enemies behind cover, and if you happen to get hit by gunfire, your character will bleed until treated by a medic character.

While we were able to take only a brief look at the game itself, it seems clear that the fully 3D game is intended to be a tribute to Jagged Alliance 2--right down to the nail-biting moments when you're ambushed by a hidden soldier on your flank and hoping against hope you don't lose your high-priced mercenary to a lucky shot. The game is scheduled for release this fall.

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