Jagged Alliance Flashback

Following the recent release of Jagged Alliance 3, I thought of revisiting some of the spin-offs of the series that have come out through the years. Flashback was key among them. A kickstarter project promising a return to "the true spirit of this legendary series". Promising to let you, once more, manage a squad of unique mercenaries with crazy personalities through intense turn-based tactical battles. Promises, promises. So many promises. But making promises is easy, actually delivering is often less so. I'm not going to beat around the bush too much, Flashback fails to deliver. Let's see how. It's not that the creators didn't make an effort. It is, as expected from a Jagged Alliance game, split between a strategic and a tactical aspect. There is an overmap that allows the player to plan his squad's next moves, attack revenue generating sectors and capture points of interest. There is even some rudimentary quests present. It's just that every single one of those aspects is so poorly implemented that they can, at best, be described as half-baked. The strategic aspect is extremely limited and somewhat ugly. The tactical combat is boring and poorly implemented, focusing too much on positioning and moving from one cover area to the other instead of engaging the enemy. The graphics are plastic-like, without proper shading and look like some cheap mobile game knock-off. Even the UI is clunky to use. Finally, the NPCs giving quests feel more like signposts with some text written on them than actual characters. In short, the execution is very poor. It is the mercs though, that deserve extra mention. The game's blurb specifically advertises their inclusion. With good reason, they are the heart and soul of Jagged Alliance. Well, here that heart and soul is dead and buried. The game, as its title indicates, is a prequel to the series. A flashback to events that took place in the 80s. So the returning mercs are all younger versions of their more famous selves and you can even encounter some favourites on their first steps in the mercenary world. This is a very interesting idea. If it was executed well, it could have been an interesting experience. If. It wasn't. In this case, the game didn't even try. Gone is the banter, gone the fun interactions, gone the vibrant commentary. There is just nothing, no content. The mercenaries are just a bunch of models you move around in the tactical map and a portrait. This isn't Jagged Alliance. I don't know what this is. Sadly, this was an incredibly disappointing experience. I remember trying this game in the past and having similar feelings. I thought I may have been too harsh, but revisiting the game now, I realise, I wasn't harsh enough. The game promises the stars but delivers absolutely jack. There are hints of a good concept here, there is a lot of promise, but something along the way just went very, very wrong. My understanding is the developer went bankrupt shortly after its release and abandoned this project. It's likely they simply never had enough money to fund the game in the first place. Whatever the case, not recommended.

Выглядит, как поделка для смартфонов. Да, тут пошаговая боевая система, но даже Back in Action будет поинтереснее. Точно не рекомендую.

https://milkandhate.wordpress.com/2024/01/08/jagged-alliance-flashback/ here's the full text didn't fit into steam or here's TTS of the full text https://youtu.be/7QWtuCV34Qw but here's some paragraphs from it: During the Kickstarter campaign i asked the devs if they will screw it up, and they said they are not gonna make Back in Action garbage. Well, i’m glad they delivered, and made a game about on par with Jagged Alliance 3 quality-wise. When it came out the reception was not very enthusiastic, so i’ve never even tried it before. At this point the abysmal Back in Action has very positive ratings on Steam and this one very negative. But Steam is a grift DRM. In reality 700 scores are split in middle, but Steam claims there are only 400 and they are all negative. And shows only negative reviews, unless you manually pick to show only the positive ones. I have no idea in which state the game was 10 years ago. I only judge the game as it is present on the store today, version 1.1.3-rc2-14135). I’ve played many games with turn-based-tactics combat to get my Fallout 2–UFO–Silent Storm–Jagged Alliance 2 fix. Including literal Fallout-clones like ATOM and UnderRail, and i got bored of them all. But this, this is the core mechanics of Jagged Alliance. It’s a low-budget low-poly extra-indie game, which has a shallower mechanical depth than even the first game. But the action of calculating time units, pointing at the enemy, and shooting it, is present and executed the way it should be. The turn-based combat is actually enjoyable. The story is pretty generic for the series — hire guns, kill the dictator. Jagged Alliance 2 just doesn’t let the developers who touch the IP to sleep at nights. The first game has a way more deep story with no dictators or deposed rulers. Pure corporate war. As a prequel this is all the same predestination, with guys from future somehow involved in this game. This is the homeland of Vicky from the first game. You can hire Buns who first appeared in the second game. At least not all of the mercs are on the island, at least there are no memes about arulco, at least no eliots. The thing goes: some island nation starts to peddle drugs, so yankeestan decides to intervene and support the local uprising with CIA operatives. It didn’t go as planned, so only one custom CIA operative (not related to any other games in the series) has survived. They organized a new, more successful uprising with the help of mercenaries hired from somewhere that is not the internet. After the despot is deposed, he somehow makes everyone involved look bad in a convoluted scheme, which i don’t think is plausible. So the leaders of the first uprising flee to europe, do some shady things and organize A.I.M. from the first game. Or not, because you can find Da Honko flakes, which means this is the BiA continuity. The game gives a rather bad first impression — the main menu is ugly as hell and looks like absolute garbage. If you get bad weather when you start the game it looks pretty bad too. But when you get a sunny day the game is actually not that ugly. And you will get used to the graphics after a time. The camera is rather bad. Instead of a free adjustable camera it has only four positions and the stupid lowering curve. It’s used so often in this damned industry, as if all the devs think it’s actually somehow good. Not only it’s annoying, the trees and other tall things obscure your vision. In 50 hours i’ve encountered no bugs or crashes. The achievements are working, but they aren’t too fun. Half you just get by playing the game, for the other you have to grind, repeating stupid actions, like harming your squad with a grenade then bandaging everyone. Jagged Alliance Flashback has better controls, better graphics, and even better GUI than the first game. But way less depth. In some sense it’s even shallower than BiA. But it is a real proper turn-based tactics game any way you rotate it, and it is representative of the core Jagged Alliance gameplay, unlike BiA and JA3.

玩了铁血联盟3以后买了全系列的捆绑包，然后就发现了隐藏在其中的这坨屎，为什么要把优秀的游戏和一坨屎捆绑在一起卖。

great turn based game

This is one of those "I am more meh on the game and my review is intended to more have the game's rating be skewed towards neutral than negative" reviews. JA Flashback is an enjoyable lower budget JA game by a small indie team that didn't have much of a budget. The game suffers from some drastic changes (such as handguns having better hit chances than rifles at close range, morale penalty for being outnumbered being especially if fighting solo/small group or shotguns almost always hitting at close range despite visual chance to hit as that's just for the center of the spread) that aren't actually bad but more not actually communicated to the player, this combined with the early game being kind of terrible gear-wise (The game does a very bad job pointing the player towards a good merchant that sells higher end guns or even decent body armor.) which means the early game blind is very annoying for wrong reasons. This game also suffers from some really bad maps for the "unimportant" battles (AKA random stretches of road) and enemy spawns have no restrictions to make sure they don't spawn too close to your squad so you can definitely get extremely unfair battles on the roads where you spawn next to little to no cover and a large enemy force that out numbers you with good gear, basically forcing you into an unwinnable fight, save in multiple slots and trying to fight only in towns is my recommendation. Militia are just auto-resolve only, you don't see them, you can't fight alongside them and if the enemy attacks a town you are inside, the game will auto-resolve all the Militia combat before you start combat. You also can't retreat from encounters which is a baffling missing feature, you can only "retreat" if you move *into* a sector with hostiles, if you enter into a sector and are in battle or the enemy moves into your sector, you can't retreat. That said once you recognise that JA Flashback works different, it is an ok JA game, not the best in the series but not completely awful like some make it out to be. Get it on sale if you want more JA after playing other games.

...да, по количеству механик и качеству их проработки этот JA сильно не дотягивает до легендарной второй части. Но, давайте откровенно, ни одна игрушка, хоть из серии JA, хоть любая другая, так и не смогла приблизиться к эталону (включая недавно вышедший (на момент написания этих строк) JA3). В целом, JA3 мало отличается от сабжа. Более того некоторые механики в JA3 были скопированы из JA:F. Короче говоря, JA:Flashback вполне неплох. Ни разу не шедевр, но и не полнейшая лажа. Разрабам таки удалось подтянуть проект после провального релиза, но общая "сырость" никуда не делась. Учитывая, что основой серии JA являются пошаговые тактические пострелушки, сабж может доставить некоторое удовольствие от оных, т.к. боёвка тут весьма неплоха. Позалипать вечерами вполне себе можно.

A great follow up to the earlier titles. very recommended

Отличная игра. Сам удивился но она мне очень понравилась

Empfehlenswert: Ja (persönliche Wertung: 6/10) Errungenschaften: Ja Positiv: - Rundenbasierte, taktische Kämpfe - Eigener Söldner - Altbekannte Charaktere - Steuerung nicht komplex Negativ: - Gegner-KI schlecht - Sehr kurzes Spiel - Abgespeckte JA-Version Fazit: Jagged Alliance Flashback hat einen schlechten Ruf bei vielen in der JA-Reihe. Doch hat es diesen auch verdient? Meiner Meinung nach nur zum Teil. Vieles macht dieser Teil auch richtig. Unser Auftrag ist es einen bösen Buben auszuschalten. Dazu erstellen wir als erstes unseren eigenen Söldner und können dann mit der Zeit weitere anheuern. Unter den angeheuerten Söldnern sind viele bekannte Charaktere aus der JA-Reihe vorhanden. Das bringt ordentlich Nostalgie mit sich. Sobald man seinen Söldner erstellt hat, bekommt man ein kleines Tutorial über die Steuerung. Diese ist nicht allzu komplex. Ich brauchte das Spiel ein paar Jahre nicht anfassen und konnte dennoch mit meinem alten Spielstand weiterspielen ohne neu anzufangen, weil ich nicht mehr wusste wie man spielt. Die taktischen Kämpfe, welche rundenbasiert sind, machen Spaß auch wenn die KI manchmal nicht die hellsten sind. Bsp.: Feind versteckt sich hinter einer Deckung und ich komme über das offene Feld auf ihn zu. In seiner Runde verlässt er die Deckung, stürmt auf mich zu und macht nichts weiter. Sozusagen hat er darum gebettelt das ich ihn erschieße... Das Spiel macht vieles richtig, auch wenn es eher wie eine stark abgespeckte Version von JA2 wirkt. Das merkt man auch an der Spielzeit. Nach insgesamt 15 Stunden war ich mit allem durch. Trotz der Kritik und den offensichtlichen Mängeln, hatte ich mehr Spaß als mit JA - Back in Action. Empfehlenswert!!!!