Jagged Alliance: Rage! is a downloadable tactical strategy RPG game. If there is one genre of games that has languished since its glory days on the 1990s PC gaming scene it is exactly this genre: tactical strategy role-playing games. Stuff like Wasteland and Baldur’s Gate. These titles, embodying some of the best in PC strategy and storytelling, not only combined the elements one would expect in a role-playing game with action gaming. They also did it all with a level of gritty realism that often marked these games out as true diamonds in the rough.
How to Download Jagged Alliance: Rage!
You can download Jagged Alliance: Rage! for PC (from Steam), PS4 and Xbox One. Before it becomes available you can watch the trailer. The release date is currently unknown.
The Game Review and the Gameplay
Too often role-playing games tended toward epic world-spanning quests between light and dark or other fares like that. Only a few focused on the personalized level of the individual fighter and the world he or she is plunged into.
This is the focus of Jagged Alliance: Rage!, a game that very much borrows from the golden age of strategy RPGs for the PCs while very much doing its own thing at the same time. Developed by Cliffhanger Productions and published by Handy Games, this turn-based title taps into the 1990s zeitgeist for a modern take on this storied genre that is both fun and necessary.
The sequel to the first Jagged Alliance takes place some 20 years after and focuses on another group of hardened yet quirky mercenaries and puts them in a jungle environment where a bunch of conflicts between different factions threatens to pain the whole place in blood.
Pitted against a drug lord and his army of crazed mercenaries, the gameplay is both emergent and immediate meaning there are some scripted events but also there are those that come completely out of the player’s own in-game choices.
How you are to set about achieving your goals, however, is something that marks Jagged Alliance: Rage! out as something different in this genre. Rather than localized skirmishes or massive battles, you are to employ guerrilla tactics to defeat your enemy, gradually weakening the drug lord’s hold over the island and enlisting partisan locals to assist you in your cause.
Choosing what to bring down and where is part of the game’s strategy and there’s nothing more rewarding than sticking it to the man in this game that has elements of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York and the Borderlands series in a tactical, strategy RPG.
Featuring online co-op and exploration elements, this game is an experience to be had solo or with friends. Dripping with high-quality production values from the first minute, the game revels in its ability to meld PC grit with Hollywood panache for storytelling.
A mature experience from the beginning, Jagged Alliance: Rage! also does not shy away from violence and gore. Of course, you can collect new items and things to change up your tactics as the game progresses but this isn’t new or unique to this game. Overall the experience is one that is delivered with the deft hand of Hollywood-style narrative and excellent gameplay that is reminiscent of the old Fallout titles in terms of presentation and general vibe.
