Jagged Alliance 3 was originally announced almost 20 years ago, so you could say that fans of the franchise have been waiting for a little while. The first mainline entry in the series since 1999's Jagged Alliance 2, the new game had its development restarted within the last couple of years in the hands of developer Haemimont Games. False starts and delays in the past can be ignored, as Jagged Alliance 3 has released as a strong revival of the franchise that was clearly placed in capable hands that loved the earlier games.

One of the first things that Jagged Alliance 3 tells the player is that it's not an incredibly serious game. Sure, there are elements to be taken seriously, such as the tactical gameplay that absolutely rewards forward thinking and using your mercenaries and their equipment to their full potential. However, as the game rightfully states, the original games "poked fun at cliches and stereotypes that existed in action movies of the time." JA3 continues in this regard, albeit with some contemporary material to work with, and somehow it lands in a place where its comedic elements feel like a throwback without feeling dated.

On the one hand, the plot of the game is a serious one — at least as serious as the plot of a cult-classic '80s action movie would be. You oversee a band of mercenaries sent to a fictional country at the request of the daughter of the country's president. The president has been kidnapped, and you've been paid to lead your mercs to rescue him. Between you and that goal are the forces of the Legion, led by the mysterious Major, and anyone within their rank would love to put your mercs into the ground and keep their stranglehold on the area.

On the other hand, Jagged Alliance 3 is delightfully unbothered to take itself too seriously. All of the mercs have voiced lines in combat and during some conversations with NPCs. Recruit Steroid, and you'll just have to guess which muscled Austrian action hero he's riffing off of, and he laments about how if he sneaks around, people can't see his magnificent biceps. Add Kalyna to the squad, and the player will start to be concerned about how steadfastly she thinks she exists in a fantasy RPG, where all missions are quests and she's on some grand adventure. Fidel just wants to blow up everything and unnerve as many people around him as possible.

A couple of characters play things straight, but otherwise, pretty much everyone and everything in the game has a dubious grasp on sanity. Visit a run-down port town, and it's a realistic portrayal of how people might come together and live in an otherwise impoverished area. Then you find out that the place is home to a bunch of elderly women who used to be in a gang called The Coffee Beans and, with a mission to persuade them, will absolutely take up arms and roll out against Legion forces.

I don't mean in some sort of level-headed way, either; I'm talking camo-print grandma dresses, oversized handbags with firearms stuffed into them, and one of them yelling, "You're about to get fucked by an old lady!" while sprinting toward an enemy with little more than a machete in hand and a heart full of malice. Honestly, if the game took itself super seriously, it'd be far less fun.

Jagged Alliance 3 isn't all nonsense, though. The actual tactical gameplay sets all of that aside and delivers a nuanced and well-balanced experience. When your mercs first deploy, the gameplay is real-time and you can move them around either individually or as a group. Get detected by the enemy, though, and the game immediately switches to turned-based, with movement governed in a grid-based system. Mercs have a certain number of action points (AP), and moving or performing actions take up varying amounts of AP to complete. The game helpfully shows how far a merc can move and still fire their equipped weapon, but there's so much more to consider.

For starters, you don't want to be caught in open ground, and mercs should really end their turn in cover, which can be either high or low. Just getting into cover isn't enough, as you'll want to spend the AP to put the merc into a crouch if it's low cover. You can also crouch or go prone outside of cover, which makes the merc harder to hit but might make it impossible for them to shoot enemies if any obstacles or sloped terrain is in the way.

Even firing at an enemy isn't just a transaction of "spent this much AP to shoot the bad guy." Weapons can target an enemy's head, torso, arms, legs, and groin. Torso shots are the easiest to make, arm shots result in the target becoming less accurate in their own attacks, headshots do more damage but are much harder shots, etc. Some weapons can fire in semi-auto, but you can spend another AP to fire a burst of shots or even more AP to fire fully automatic — albeit with an accuracy penalty. You can also spend AP to introduce multiple levels of aiming at the target, which improves your chance to make the shot.

The game shows factors of elements that make it harder or easier to make a shot, such as if the target is in cover or if your merc has the high ground, but it never shows hard percentages. This is purposeful, as the developers wanted the gameplay to feel more chaotic and involve gut decisions; they felt that percentages would make the gameplay feel too analytical. That said, the game has Steam workshop support, and one of the first mods did exactly that, and it was released by the developers. Personally, I like the gameplay as-is, but kudos to the developers for doing that either way.

You have full control over how you manage your squads, and at first, you only have some starting money that has to last as you hire some initial mercs to the first squad. The mercs are categorized as Recruit, Veteran, etc., with increasingly higher contract costs. When you reach out to a merc, you set how many days you want to hire them for, and when the contract is up, you'll have to pay again to keep them for a new duration. They can get incredibly expensive if you are looking at the higher categories, so at first, you're only bringing on three or four recruits. Later in the game, you can operate multiple six-person squads at the same time.

Jagged Alliance 3 has tutorial tooltips that can be enabled to help you understand the game, but even with them on, gameplay elements are missed, and the game stops pulling punches pretty early on. After the first couple of introductory fights where your squad of mercs is rarely even outnumbered, the game throws you into a situation where the enemies nearly outnumber you two to one and many of them have automatic weapons. It's not unfair by any measure, but in my case, it resulted in loading a few saves as I learned nuances to the combat that no tutorial was going to walk me through until I learned it via my own gameplay choices.

No tutorial mentions the importance of scrapping unnecessary weapons/gear, which is important to know, as there is never a place to sell them. For the most part, if something isn't an immediate upgrade or otherwise useful, it should be scrapped. These scraps can then be used by a merc with a high enough mechanical skill to upgrade the weapons you want to keep, such as adding varying optics or a silencer. I spent a good part of the early game with a squad full of inventories packed with extra rifles and random things before I realized the importance of scrapping.

Silencers are incredibly important. If you give one to someone with high marksmanship, you can pick off enemies prior to the start of combat, while you are still in the real-time mode. Granted, if an enemy sees someone get killed or finds a body, it will immediately trigger combat (even though they may not know where your squad is), but it's possible to clear entire maps without triggering combat. That's rare, though; generally, you'll pick off one or two high-value targets to give you an edge before going into combat.

Attrition should always be on your mind, and that is one area where the game can feel needlessly insistent. After a fight, your mercs may have wounds that need healing or are low on ammo. You can start Operations that a number of mercs can participate in to heal wounds, craft, etc., which take a number of hours to complete based on a variety of factors. You might have a couple doing that healing, while another scouts the nearby area for medical supplies and intel. This all takes time, which ticks away from all of the contracts that your mercs are working under.

You capture diamond mines to bolster your daily income, and you can intercept enemy squads moving on the overworld map to steal and sell their diamond shipments from enemy-controlled mines. In enemy hands, mines last forever … but in yours, the mines eventually run out of diamonds and drop their income to zero. There are other smaller ways to generate income, such as finding tiny diamonds or other valuables to sell, but your ability to operate in the region is tied to having mines generating income, and those mines will eventually deplete, so new ones need to be captured.

This feels punishing, as if you want to operate a squad of "Elite" mercs, their contract costs alone can amount to what a couple of diamond mines put out, and there's a finite number of mines to be found. Here is where mods can come in and make it so that mines don't run out. To each their own, but in the game as designed, it is hard to commit to waiting around too long to tend to your mercs' needs knowing that your ability to pay them (and your time in the playthrough) is finite and you eventually will lose all means of reliable income. That said, I had no issues fielding a couple of squads of mercs that started as recruits or veterans and had enough money coming in to remain solvent.

Finally, while mercs gain experience and level up their base stats organically while doing things mid-mission, it doesn't feel like it matters much. I am sure from a mechanical standpoint that there is a benefit to a merc gaining a skill point in marksmanship while shooting enemies or reading a magazine to get a one-time single point added. However, every time you level, you also gain a perk point, which have significantly higher ability requirements as you go.

Hire a merc as a recruit, and they may have a respectable 70 marksmanship, but the highest tier of marksmanship perks requires 90, and you'll be hard-pressed to get that many points before the end of the game. Sure, you can start operations where one merc spends a couple of days training another in a specific ability or skill, but that takes time, of which you have a finite, unknowable amount. I ended up with mercs with unspendable perk points and the knowledge that it was incredibly unlikely they'd ever be able to do so.

With all of that being said, Jagged Alliance 3 nails a lot of what it is trying to do. Gripes about financial pressure and perk points aside, the majority of gameplay is a ton of fun. It rewards tactical thinking, and with a skillful approach, you can watch your mercs absolutely rain hell down on a superior enemy force. Considerate use of special abilities and equipment is important as well, and rarely is any fight just an easy shootout. The execution isn't perfect, but Jagged Alliance 3 is simultaneously a love letter to the tactical games of old while also proving that their gameplay can still feel modern and fresh decades later.

Score: 8.7/10

Reviewed on: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, 32 GB RAM, NVidia RTX 4070 T