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mrwitte
Reviews
Jagged Alliance 2 (1999)
Promising but inscrutable
This game has a lot going for it, but the unusable interface is beyond belief. I find myself asking questions like "why won't the grenade I threw explode?" and "I'm 6 feet away from this guy with a healthy character and full magazine, so why won't my cursor highlight him so I can shoot him?" to the point where the challenge of the game becomes more about overcoming the clueless interface feedback than actual squad tactics. It's sort of an exercise in programming and systems troubleshooting, sort of like learning for the first time how to set up a wireless router with password security so it works with both PCs and Macs - only at the end of all your hard work you've learned how to play Jagged Alliance 2 instead of garnering any marketable skills. When games like Total Annihilation were out two years before this one (I know it's a very different type of game, but there are still a lot of relevant lessons to be learned from the interface design) even the "but it was 1999" excuse becomes flimsy