Jagged Alliance 2: Unfinished Business Preview

Sometimes you need a little extra time to take care of unfinished business. This was the case with the aptly titled follow-up to Jagged Alliance 2, which Canadian developer Sir-tech originally announced as an expansion to its squad-based tactical combat game. This was around one year ago. But only in the last couple of weeks, Interplay announced that it had acquired publishing rights to the latest Jagged Alliance game and would release it this November as a stand-alone product for a discounted price. It's been a long time in the making, but the imminent release of Unfinished Business is great news for fans of Jagged Alliance - and for anyone who enjoys a great tactical combat game.

Click for full size image

Jagged Alliance 2 shipped in the summer of 1999 - later than it should have, because Sir-tech weathered some tough times and subsequently stopped publishing games. Fortunately, TalonSoft later acquired the publishing rights to Jagged Alliance 2 and finally released the game. Though it wasn't a commercial success, critics and fans loved it - Jagged Alliance 2 featured deep, strategic turn-based combat, interesting role-playing elements, a good story, and even a healthy sense of humor. You played as a free agent who was charged with the responsibility of liberating Arulco, a small island nation off the coast of South America. To do this, you had to hire a crack team of mercenary gunmen to do your bidding - and for the right price. You had to manage these raw soldiers and train them into a powerful, competent military unit. You also had to contend with their individual personalities and make sure to put their strongest skills to good use. Jagged Alliance 2 was a long, involving game that combined several genres in an unusually conventional real-world setting.

Click for full size image

Unfinished Business picks up where Jagged Alliance 2 left off, and it is designed to be a smaller, more focused game that capitalizes on the strongest elements of its namesake. For instance, the original Jagged Alliance 2 featured a fairly complex strategic layer: As you fought your way through Arulco, you had to lay claim to resource mines and hire militia to defend them. Toward the end of the game, it became quite difficult to cover all your bases, and initially, it was very hard to keep the cash rolling in so that you could pay your mercenaries. By comparison, Unfinished Business offers a smaller, less open-ended campaign that has a stronger plot and not as much macromanagement. Unfinished Business therefore emphasizes what's certainly the best part of the Jagged Alliance series: tactical combat between mercenaries. To this end, Unfinished Business introduces several new personalities to the dozens of available mercs for hire, and it also offers a couple of significant new gameplay features that make the combat even more involving than before. Fans of Jagged Alliance will find that Unfinished Business is very similar to last year's game; and players who are inexperienced with the series might find that Unfinished Business looks somewhat dated. However, the game's highly refined combat model and its very distinctive cast of characters makes Unfinished Business transcend its aging graphics. Read on to find out why you've got to go back and mop up in Unfinished Business - and why you'll want to.