Jagged Alliance: Back in Action Preview

The latest preview for Kalypso Media and bitComposer Games’ Jagged Alliance: Back in Action has been penned by the folks at Worthplaying, who had the chance to go hands-on with the Jagged Alliance 2 remake. Here’s a bit on the new “Plan & Go” system that will replace the turn-based combat of the original:

In previous Jagged Alliance titles, combat was a drawn-out, turn-based affair, with players managing actions and action points. Sure, it was super crunchy and tactical, but most modern gamers, even fans of the genre, don’t have the time or patience for this anymore.

How do you modernize this sort of gameplay without dumbing it down? Jagged Alliance’s developers are trying to do just that with the Plan ‘n Go system, which focuses on waypoint management, along the same lines as the original Rainbow Six games. Forget about action points; P ‘n G is about timing and skilled planning. Want to swap a weapon? That’s going to take time, and in that time, the enemy may have finished reloading and put a round in your team leader’s skull. An example we were shown was setting up a simple op to take out a guard. First, a sniper slowly crawls to his position behind a crate, stopping a few times along the way to ensure nobody’s spotted him. While this is going on, our stealthy killer, trusty knife in hand, drops to a crouch to reduce visibility and slowly stalks an unwary guard.

At the bottom of the screen, a timeline for both characters appears, much like a filmstrip editor, which lets you set up sequences such as, “After A moves to his second waypoint, move character B to his first point,” and so on. It’s all done through simple point-and-click and drag-and-drop. Pretty soon, we’ve set up a situation where our melee fighter takes a swipe at a guard and if he misses, the sniper pops up from his hiding place and fires a shot at the now-aware guard’s head. If the melee attack succeeds, our sniper stays in hiding, monitoring for any other guards who might stumble into our ambush.