Jagged Alliance 3

For two decades, Jagged Alliance has been the genre’s most abused corpse. Since Jagged Alliance 2 landed in 1999 and quietly established half the vocabulary modern tactics games still use — action points, interrupts, mercenary payroll, sector-by-sector attrition — the license has been passed between studios like a bad debt. Back in Action. Rage!. Flashback. Each one arrived promising a revival and delivered a tech demo with a famous name stapled to it. Fans stopped hoping somewhere around 2015.

So the most surprising thing about Jagged Alliance 3 is that it’s good. Not good-for-a-revival. Good.

The developer is Haemimont Games, the Bulgarian studio best known for Tropico 3-5 and Surviving Mars — which, on paper, reads like a mismatch. These are city-builder people. Systems people. What they brought to the table turns out to be exactly the thing every previous attempt missed: an understanding that Jagged Alliance was never primarily a combat game. It was a management sim about employing difficult people in a country falling apart, and the shooting was how you found out whether your staffing decisions were any good.

The setup is pure late-90s pulp, and unapologetic about it. Grand Chien, a fictional West African nation, has lost its elected president. A paramilitary outfit called the Legion has filled the vacuum. The president’s wife hires you — a contractor with a laptop and a line of credit — to find him. You spend that credit at A.I.M., the mercenary marketplace, and everything that follows depends on who you picked and whether they can stand each other.

THQ Nordic published it into a market that has become genuinely crowded. XCOM 2 set the modern baseline. Phoenix Point, Wasteland 3, BattleTech, and the Mutant Year Zero lineage all staked claims. Jagged Alliance 3 doesn’t out-polish any of them. It wins on texture — on the fact that its systems produce stories the others can’t.

• The A.I.M. Roster: A large roster of hireable mercenaries, a mix of JA2 veterans and newcomers, each with full voice work, distinct combat specializations, escalating salary tiers, and — critically — opinions about their coworkers. Ivan doesn’t speak English. Fidel is a liability with explosives. Two mercs who hate each other will actively degrade squad morale.
• Two-Layer Campaign Structure: A real-time strategic map where you claim sectors, seize diamond mines to fund payroll, train local militia, and run multiple squads simultaneously — feeding into turn-based tactical battles with action points, cover, overwatch, stealth takedowns, targeted limb shots, and destructible terrain.
• Scavenge-and-Mod Progression: No tech tree. Every weapon is looted off a corpse, then rebuilt at a workbench with scopes, barrels, suppressors and grips. Your loadout is a record of who you’ve killed.
• Open-Ended Objectives: The campaign lets you choose which threads to pull and which factions to court. Sector order is largely yours. Multiple routes to the endgame.
• Full Online Co-op: The entire campaign, playable with a partner splitting the squad.

The Gameplay Loop

The loop is a payroll clock, and that’s the smartest design decision in the game.

Mercs are hired on contracts — days, not missions. Every in-game day costs money whether you fought or not. Money comes from diamond mines, and mines come from sectors, and sectors have to be held by militia you trained and equipped. So the strategic layer isn’t a menu between fights. It’s a pressure system. Take too long clearing a region and the hiring screen becomes a trap: your best sniper’s contract expires, and her renewal quote has gone up because she’s now a war hero.

This does something XCOM‘s campaign never quite manages. It makes the tactical layer’s efficiency actually matter beyond the individual mission. Winning a fight is table stakes. Winning it fast, without burning medkits, without a merc taking a leg wound that costs days of downtime — that’s the real scoring.

Combat

The tactical combat is tight and, importantly, readable. Haemimont resisted the temptation to build an opaque simulation. Cover states are legible at a glance. Hit chances update live as you sweep the cursor. The action point economy is granular enough that a single point matters — the difference between a shot and a crouched shot, between reaching cover and dying in the open.

Two systems make the combat more than competent. First, free aim and limb targeting: you can aim at a leg to cripple, an arm to disarm, or spend extra AP for a head shot at a punishing accuracy cost. It converts every shot into a small risk calculation rather than a dice roll you accept. Second, the interrupt system, inherited from JA2 — high-agility mercs can steal a fraction of the enemy’s turn mid-move. It makes stat investment feel consequential in a way that flat percentage buffs never do.

Stealth deserves specific credit. Nighttime infiltration with suppressed weapons is designed as a different game from a daylight assault, rewarding scouting, timing patrol routes, and thinning a garrison before anyone raises an alarm. Whether that’s viable depends entirely on which mercs you hired — which loops back to the hiring screen, which is the point.

Writing and Character

This is where the game separates itself. The mercenary cast is written with a confidence that borders on reckless. These are broad, loud, occasionally tasteless characters — a Russian who communicates in untranslated shouting, a demolitions expert whose enthusiasm is a documented war crime, a medic who moralizes at you. They bicker mid-firefight. They comment on your tactics. They quit.

The alternative would have been a roster of stat blocks with portraits. Instead, hiring decisions carry actual emotional weight, and losing someone lands. The writing is load-bearing, not decoration.

The Grand Chien setting handles its material with more care than the genre’s history would predict — the local factions have their own agendas, and the game generally avoids treating the country as scenery. It’s pulp, but it’s aware that it’s pulp.

Where It Breaks Down

The mid-to-late game drags. Badly.

Once your squad is kitted out and the map is largely yours, the Legion’s counterattacks become an administrative chore. You’re shuttling squads back to defend sectors against enemies that no longer threaten you, resolving battles you’ve already won a dozen times. Enemy scaling is undercooked — the difficulty curve flattens right as the map opens up, so the challenge shifts from tactical to logistical, and logistics here aren’t interesting enough to carry the back half.

Militia management is the weakest system in the box. Training is slow, the units are fodder, and the interface gives you almost no tools to manage them at scale. It’s a system that demands attention without rewarding it.

Inventory is the other persistent irritation. Moving ammunition, medkits and mods between mercs and squads means a lot of clicking through nested panels. Across a full squad split over multiple locations, the friction adds up. The inventory screen is built for small catalogs and gets crowded as the operation grows. This is a solved problem in other games; there’s no excuse for it here.

The art direction is functional rather than striking — a slightly stylized realism, warm palettes, readable silhouettes. Nobody will screenshot this for the composition. But it does the one job a tactics game’s visuals must do: you can always tell what’s happening. Cover is obvious. Elevation is obvious. Line of sight is obvious. Destructible walls behave the way you expect them to. That’s worth more than lighting fidelity.

Environments have real personality — mining towns, colonial ruins, jungle outposts — and the destruction, while not fully simulated, changes fights meaningfully when you blow a hole in a compound wall.

The UI is competent with rough edges. The tactical HUD is excellent. The strategic map and inventory screens feel like they came from a different, less-loved project.

As a 2D-leaning tactics game of this scope, it should be light on hardware by 2023 standards. The launch build, however, shipped with co-op desync and save corruption problems, and substantial patching followed. That history should still factor into how much faith you put in a fresh multiplayer campaign.

This is a PC game on Steam and makes no apology for it. Mouse and keyboard is the only input that makes sense — the free-aim system alone depends on cursor precision that a stick can’t replicate, and the inventory screens would be miserable with a gamepad.

Steam brings the meaningful advantages here. Cloud saves matter for a campaign of this length. The Workshop mod scene is active, covering inventory quality-of-life, roster additions, and rebalancing for players who want the late game to keep biting. If the difficulty curve flattens for you, the mods are the answer, and they’re one click away.

Co-op runs through Steam networking and, post-patching, is designed to hold up — splitting a squad between two players changes the tactical math entirely. Just make sure you’re both fully patched.

Jagged Alliance 3 is the rare revival that identifies what actually made the original work. Not the isometric camera, not the action points — the people. Haemimont understood that this series lives or dies on whether you care which six lunatics are in your squad, and built everything else outward from that.

The combat is excellent. The hiring economy is smart. The open campaign structure gives you genuine ownership over how the war goes. Then, somewhere in the final act, the game runs out of ideas and asks you to keep playing anyway — defending sectors against an enemy that stopped being scary, clicking through inventory screens that should have been fixed in beta.

That’s a real flaw, and it’s the difference between a very good tactics game and a landmark one. We recommend it to tactics players who can live with a sagging back half — the core of this game earns the price of admission on its own. Mods patch some of the rest. Patience patches what’s left.