The Less Interesting TimesOn the Bleeding Edge

Honestly, I was really excited about it. It’s a Plan & Go tactical game only this time with mercenaries and real-world guns and not with aliens and phaser weapons. I mean, I love the new UFO trilogy and part of what makes it good is this awesome mechanic. So anything with that mechanic should be good, right? Wrong.I’m not sure where this game fails. Maybe it’s the many bugs and hickups not even three patches managed to fix. Maybe it’s the fucked up authority on who can aim and hit what and where. Maybe it’s the insane difficulty that ramps up as you go along. Maybe it’s strategic area of the game that makes almost no sense. And maybe it all adds up to a lot of tedium and repetitiveness that gets you nowhere and the fact that winning conditions in every single area, from mission parameters, through single shootouts up to gun statistics, seem completely arbitrary.

I ended up quitting roughly half way through after the fifth time that my team of three was dying in front of one sniper they couldn’t hit, despite the fact that he was making headshot after headshot.

At the end, it just seems like this game could have been really good but fell on its face due to lack of polish. And I probably won’t play the original Jagged Alliance because I can’t really get back to that style of playing right now. Which also makes me sad because I would probably also immediately dislike the new X-COM game because it goes back to turned based.

Oh, well…