Jagged Alliance: 5 Things That Could Fix The Series

One of the better Jagged Alliance games to come out in the past decade was, of all things, Jagged Alliance Online. JAO was a huge improvement compared to the system debuted in Back in Action and was a fairly fun romp.

It really centred on a competitive PVP mode, but for those who just wanted to enjoy a single-player story experience there was “Over 100 missions and 60+ hours of game time”. Not bad for an online free-to-play game! You could toss some real money at it and unlock cool weapons and armor, but true to what many free-to-play games claim – you really could unlock everything in the game. Assuming you had the time to spare.

The only thing you couldn't unlock in the game was...the other 97 missions after the tutorial. For something like $20 you could unlock about thirty missions, then another $20, and another $20. Also while it was true you could unlock every item through just playing the game you often wound up spending almost what your reward was for completing a mission, especially since the enemy difficulty scaled quicker than your rewards did.

This meant that most of those 60+ hours of gameplay were spent grinding to struggle through the next mission. Many played the tutorial and then gave up and the game quietly became a $10 'get the whole thing' experience, but now the servers are shut down so even that boat has sailed.