Jagged Alliance (PC, 1994)
Graphics-6.5 Sound-7.5 Control-6.5 Challenge-7.5 Story-7
Level Design-6.5 Frustration-9 Fun-6.5 Originality-7
Overall Score-6.5
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Turn-based squad combat gameplay w/ real-time (time passes during combat and exploration and you need to be in a conquered sector at the end of the day or some mercs will most likely die in an automated retreat) & RPG & strategy elements (chars level up their skills (depending on your actions), recruit and dismiss teammates (up to 8), manage resources and funds, chars have their own personalities and some refuse to join until you're good enough or if a merc they hate is in your team, map mode where you can distribute CPU guards and tapping activity (extracting tree sap for money) on conquered sectors - you can even control worker salary (though it's impossible to lower it if you do raise it))
Soft and hard cover
Open ended structure (travel freely between sectors during the course of a mission (a day) - the more you get done per day the better) - however there's a fairly obvious recommended path to take during the first few days as you'll notice from how well guarded some areas are
Wait feature (time compression, C)
Pretty good voice acting overall (each of the 60 (!) different mercenaries is voiced as well as your employees; subtitles)
Real-time map screen (exploration in conquered sectors is real time, RMB+move pointer downwards to display))
Weapon upgrades/augmentations (can also combine different items to make new ones such as the molotov cocktail (jar, gas, oil, cloth)
Keyboard hotkeys (cycle betwen chars, inventory, options, etc.)
Difficulty and sound options
Optional quick save/load during missions (can only save properly between missions)
Can waste more action points to increase attack accuracy
P&C home base screen
Overwatch/interrupt feature (saving action points can let you interrupt enemies while they're moving (sometimes useless if it happens when you didn't save enough points to attack) - enemies can do the same)
Can halt a move action by pressing Esc (but not revert it)
Animated dialogue portraits
Crouching
Stealth (sneak by holding shift and clicking, silencers, spying by listening to enemies through walls - can sometimes reveal hints) and trapping (set explosives or lure enemies with thrown rocks)
Can leave chars behind to train certain skills or rest during missions (mechanics and doctors can also repair items and heal mercs respectively)
Can zoom in on/enlarge item sprites in the action view
Can move the entire squad at once (only in exploration mode though)
Some comic relief characters (Tex, Reuban)
Cryptic notes with tips on where to be and when for special events/better supplies
Dropped items show as flashing white dots on the sector map view (makes it much easier to find loot behind walls or plants) Toggleable HUD
Right click on a char's main or off hand item to quickly switch between your most important active items
Can switch places with other mercs in narrow paths (press X while targeting the merc to switch with)
Some alternate solutions to side objectives (can blow up the first infected tree when the virus event happens to stop the spread, battles can play out very differently depending on how you enter each sector and which tactic the AI happens to pick, etc.)
Some interesting enemy tactics (blowing up processing plants by remote control - need to be stealthy, kidnapping one of the main NPCs)
One of the chars (Hurl) can give you gossip about your team's thoughts
Alternate ending (save the sapling in the final sector)
Decent ambient sfx
+/-
Save feature (10 nameable slots)
Limited ammo and money
Deteriorating gear
Perma-death
Limited inventories
Healing can take several turns (there's also no wait/compress until healed option outside of battle)
Overwhelming amount of chars to select from right from the start (many will decline early on though)
Silly item name announcer
Mission timer (1 day in-game=around 2 hours IRL)
Killed enemies quickly turn into skeletons and dissipate (unusually cartoony compared to the rest of the game)
Chars will generally spot items when you move close but sometimes you have to examine environments thoroughly (without visual clues and it's time consuming)
Chars need to stand close to each other to trade items even in exploration mode
Energy/stamina stat - if it depletes the char will collapse and keep doing it until you use time compression to restore their energy a bit (looks funny but can get rather tedious at times)
Need to get pretty close to spot enemies
Pretty slow character stats progression (you're expected to trade up to better and more expensive chars over the course of the game)
Persistent gear
You can hire a native guide for free via the boss (will comment on each new area with a heavy accent providing lore/personality and some gameplay tips) - however you have to keep an empty team slot for the event to trigger and it's not guaranteed
Huge penalty for not making it back to a conquered area before a day ends (several mercs will generally die and because of this some of the mercs that didn't are likely to resign)
Can't sell or buy gear or ammo (except by hiring mercs equipped with what you want)
Can't make mercs turn around without also moving
Pretty rare (and semi-randomized) gun drops from killed enemies
Melee attacks require a surprising amount of AP (I've run up to an enemy around a corner and then back again while not being able to actually attack)
No nighttime combat
Permanent stat losses (critical hits and health points lost when below 15 HP)
Can't repair items in the field
Random element to enemy AI (indoors enemies sometimes come out when near the door but other times they'll stay inside until you open the door regardless of if you shot at or threw a grenade at the door (unless it's wooden in which case it's destroyed))
Merc salary increases aren't proportionate to their stat increases between level ups (aka "experience class"; they become better at detection and stealth though and a small hidden bonus to skills is applied)
You can get around the "aggressive/obsessive" behavior of some mercs (the merc won't respond to any order other than shooting the previously picked enemy until it's dead; Leech and Fidel for example) by removing the weapon from their main hand
The final "vest" (ultra shield) gives very good protection but has no pockets
-
No tutorial and you can't contact your boss during a mission to report your status or ask for help
Can't save after setting up (equipment and training) but before starting a mission/setting out - especially annoying when you want to replace someone and remove their equipment at the same time, squad movement stops during fast forward/time compression (wtf?)
Guns jam too easily (can usually be unjammed fairly quickly but it can make you lose mercs if you're unlucky and playing aggressively)
The enemy AI has a tendency of not attacking with the last one or two soldiers in a sector and of running away with its last soldiers when they are badly hurt (slows down the pacing by a lot since the enemy AI will never actually retreat from a sector)
Hard to replenish health (you only get ~10% back per day from resting and you can't rest or use items in-game to regain health (need to keep a doctor with a healing item (which will be drained) in the base and make hurt mercs their patients) - since health affects action points and how easily a merc gets knocked out you can easily find yourself in a downward spiral after doing well for the first 2-3 days on Normal (the limited funds and having to capture more processing plants to increase your income per day is another big factor, cpu guards and even some mercs quitting if you don't do well enough is another big factor - the cpu guard stock takes time to replenish and enemy attacks on your areas will rather suddenly increase by a lot, the poisoned water supply is yet another big factor))
Seemingly random chance of your CPU guards surviving an attack on their own (I've seen 2 enemy soldiers take out 4 guards and at one point unguarded tappers winning against enemy soldiers) - what sucks about these fights is that you can't predict them nor can you come to your guards' aid during one of them
Can't cancel a chosen deployment sector when planning before a mission
Can't make mercs help other mercs that are drowning or fighting off a snake
Sometimes bad pathfinding (if you make the entire team move somewhere on a map with bridges and water they can get stuck on the bridge or try to swim when it could kill them)
Interface/control problems (flowers don't stack, can't skip the drowning cutscene or go to options during the enemy's turn, sometimes can't use escape to go back to th previous menu/screen, the mouse cursor automatically moves to the "done" button when a new turn starts making it fairly easy to skip another one by accident - particularly when moving between areas in zoomed out/sector map mode, keys/notes take up a full inventory slot (keys of the same type stack (but only up to 5) and if you're trying to open a door while the right key is in the merc's inventory it'll be used automatically) - it's also fairly easy to end up with a bunch of unusable keys if you use lockpicking a lot (it's not always the case that a key only works in the sector it was found in from what I can tell)
Can't skip movement animations
Pretty tedious inventory management (could've been made smoother in exploration mode or they could've made it so that items in conquered areas are put in your team inventory automatically)
Need to examine item containers twice to take the item (if empty the char says to but if not it goes "hmm" and you have to look again)
Lacking tooltips (can only examine items - not mechanics or feature buttons)
Game doesn't let you start moving towards a destination if you clicked an item or interactive object and the char doesn't have enough action points (another problem that this causes is that you can't move to tiles with an item on them without issuing an order to move past the tile and using Esc to stop moving to end up on that tile)
Annoying pauses when chars talk and some delay when trying to skip the dialogue (certain characters have quirks that for example make them scared when alone or not follow orders for one turn and their dialogue is always the same)
Uneven visuals (pretty good portraits and menus, decent cutscene and items art, bad in-game sprites and backgrounds, somewhat hard to read font)
No translation of Ivan's dialogue (the subtitles are in russian too)
Characters look nearly identical in the in-game view
Hard to spot doors from certain angles (should've let you rotate or tilt the view, or make them flash like items do)
Fast scrolling is way too fast (modern PC issue?)
Kinda slow paced (can miss attacks fairly easily even with high stats plus good gear (in an inconsistent way - sometimes you'll do great against a couple of enemies but if you take losses later in the battle and reload the save you might do much worse against the same enemies just based on luck) and enemies take several shots to kill even early on)
Trial & error (poor directions for some sub objectives (tombstone, tree virus cure), canteens (water) auto refill in the morning, hard to detect later traps even with explosive or mechanics experts (tedious to use the mine detector during battle), having a healthy and energized enough merc when opening crates (you waste energy by trying to open them) - helps to use a crowbar though, near the beginning your mercs will be weakened by a poisoned water supply - unless you knew about this and which sectors you need to conquer there's a pretty big difficulty spike early on, the enemy can blow up their processing plants if you don't finish those areas in the right way - need to lockpick the front door at the first one you encounter (generally you need to use silencers on your guns and there's a detonator you can find and disarm, each one has a soldier with a remote control over the detonator - can't tell who?) - however they'll rebuild it after a few days so you can try again, you can sometimes walk right into an encounter with heavily armed enemies when moving into a new area, various mechanics, some unintuitive stat effects and how you train some individual stats, need to keep track of wounds that keep damaging chars over time as there's no indicator to remind you of them later)
Can't simply ask mercs to leave or take a break - must fire them (which pisses them off and makes some (most?) of them not want to work for you again)
Mercs can decide to take a vacation (for 1-2 weeks) if they're carrying too much found money in-game
At least 10+ mercs are redundant apart from their personality
Some locked rooms and hard to open crates that are also empty
In some later battles the enemies always get to interrupt your turn and shoot first
Dropped items can end up unreachable if you drop several items on top of each other (making them spread out instead of stack) in narrow areas
Can't attack in melee without a melee weapon
Bugs:
-The tree virus mission can glitch out (your boss forgets that you've already collected flowers) - Only 2 of 4 collected flowers are spent when you first collected them and Brenda talks about it so you can put the remaining 2 in the inventory on the next day and return with flowers again,
-The travel menu sometimes won't appear for seemingly no reason - Haven't found a quick fix but moving around and checking inventories or speeding up time will eventually fix it; you can also hold LMB and move in the direction you want to travel when the squad is in position (seems much more reliable)
-Sometimes you can't travel despite being near a sector's edge and having everyone grouped together - generally solved by moving around a bit and trying again
-There's a rare bug related to travel which makes it trigger during battles (when it happened to me the squad traveled back to where I entered the unconquered sector from),
-It's sometimes possible to trade items at long range (make the receiving merc go open a door/use a key/lockpick while holding an item in the first merc's inventory screen (should pause the game normally) - the item will tranfer to the other merc) - I wasn't able to reproduce this one
Comment:
Sadly it's a mixed bag. The game is very ambitious and innovative for its time, and I enjoyed the characters and managing my team a lot, but it's brutally hard with a fairly dated interface and a lot of downtime between its interesting parts in the form of inventory management and simply moving around the map.
Good: You get to hire and level up a squad of up to 8 mercs (out of 60 different ones, fully voiced and each with their own personality quirks affecting gameplay) which can be replaced at any point, as well as manage CPU controlled guards and workers in conquered territory to be able to fund your team. There are sidequests, some with alternate solutions and you can spy on enemy guards for clues to some of them using a probe. You get to choose which sector to attack, when and from which direction on the world map, and you can escape and re-enter battles as long as you can make it to the edge of the sector with a gathered party. There's a real time element in the form of a day/night cycle - you move out in the morning and need to make it back to a conquered sector before nighttime. If you're finished for the day or need to regain stamina (mercs will move slower and eventually collapse when it's drained), there's a fast forward option you can use outside of battle. Movement is also in real time outside of battle and you can move the entire squad at once like in an RTS, which is kind of neat for 1994. Another cool thing is that you need to use stealth to capture certain sectors with processing plants in them, which give a boost to your economy, or the enemy will blow the plant up with an in-battle soldier using a remote control. It's also not a huge setback if it does get blown up as it will eventually be repaired. Finally the ending can change depending on a couple of actions you take in-game.
Bad: Besides what I mentioned above, you pretty much need to read the manual thoroughly as well as watch part of some LP before playing or you'll probably walk into the game spending too much money, slowly killing everyone off and ending up having to restart after several hours of play. This is because the game can hit you with a lot of unexpected events early on, like your water supply getting poisoned and you having to figure out which sectors to conquer to fix this without much direction, or the CPU guards and workers (and even your mercs) suddenly quitting if you're not doing well enough.
In combat, the game can get annoyingly random by letting the enemy hit your mercs while you can't hit back even with great aiming skills and gear, and your guns also tend to get jammed for a few turns even in pretty good condition (almost everything deteriorates actually, but since you can leave a merc in the base to repair things it's not much of an issue except for the guns jamming). At other times, or after reloading the quicksave, everything might go your way instead. But in general the enemies have an easier time hitting than you do.
Speaking of the enemies, they have a tendency to start running away when low on HP, but never actually retreating from the sector, which can lead to drawn out segments of slowly chasing down the last enemy in a sector. This becomes really tedious with hurt mercs since they lose action points as they lose health, plus their move animation becomes much slower and can't be skipped. Sadly the fast forward option also can't be used to move faster during exploration, making you spend a lot more time with moving around the world map and collecting loot than you'd want to. There are other flaws about the interface that bothered me, but then again I'm picky about that stuff.
Finally I have to mention the swimming, which is a nightmare. If you do play the game, just avoid deep water if you can, as it's very likely that a merc will drown from a random snake attack while swimming just a short distance and it also takes a toll on your gear. It helps to bring a knife for the merc to fight the snake with, but you'll still have to watch a slow animation and will lose a bunch of health and stamina from it. You also can't send someone else in to help the merc from drowning, other than giving them bottled water with which to replenish some stamina.
Level Design-6.5 Frustration-9 Fun-6.5 Originality-7
Overall Score-6.5
-
Turn-based squad combat gameplay w/ real-time (time passes during combat and exploration and you need to be in a conquered sector at the end of the day or some mercs will most likely die in an automated retreat) & RPG & strategy elements (chars level up their skills (depending on your actions), recruit and dismiss teammates (up to 8), manage resources and funds, chars have their own personalities and some refuse to join until you're good enough or if a merc they hate is in your team, map mode where you can distribute CPU guards and tapping activity (extracting tree sap for money) on conquered sectors - you can even control worker salary (though it's impossible to lower it if you do raise it))
Soft and hard cover
Open ended structure (travel freely between sectors during the course of a mission (a day) - the more you get done per day the better) - however there's a fairly obvious recommended path to take during the first few days as you'll notice from how well guarded some areas are
Wait feature (time compression, C)
Pretty good voice acting overall (each of the 60 (!) different mercenaries is voiced as well as your employees; subtitles)
Real-time map screen (exploration in conquered sectors is real time, RMB+move pointer downwards to display))
Weapon upgrades/augmentations (can also combine different items to make new ones such as the molotov cocktail (jar, gas, oil, cloth)
Keyboard hotkeys (cycle betwen chars, inventory, options, etc.)
Difficulty and sound options
Optional quick save/load during missions (can only save properly between missions)
Can waste more action points to increase attack accuracy
P&C home base screen
Overwatch/interrupt feature (saving action points can let you interrupt enemies while they're moving (sometimes useless if it happens when you didn't save enough points to attack) - enemies can do the same)
Can halt a move action by pressing Esc (but not revert it)
Animated dialogue portraits
Crouching
Stealth (sneak by holding shift and clicking, silencers, spying by listening to enemies through walls - can sometimes reveal hints) and trapping (set explosives or lure enemies with thrown rocks)
Can leave chars behind to train certain skills or rest during missions (mechanics and doctors can also repair items and heal mercs respectively)
Can zoom in on/enlarge item sprites in the action view
Can move the entire squad at once (only in exploration mode though)
Some comic relief characters (Tex, Reuban)
Cryptic notes with tips on where to be and when for special events/better supplies
Dropped items show as flashing white dots on the sector map view (makes it much easier to find loot behind walls or plants) Toggleable HUD
Right click on a char's main or off hand item to quickly switch between your most important active items
Can switch places with other mercs in narrow paths (press X while targeting the merc to switch with)
Some alternate solutions to side objectives (can blow up the first infected tree when the virus event happens to stop the spread, battles can play out very differently depending on how you enter each sector and which tactic the AI happens to pick, etc.)
Some interesting enemy tactics (blowing up processing plants by remote control - need to be stealthy, kidnapping one of the main NPCs)
One of the chars (Hurl) can give you gossip about your team's thoughts
Alternate ending (save the sapling in the final sector)
Decent ambient sfx
+/-
Save feature (10 nameable slots)
Limited ammo and money
Deteriorating gear
Perma-death
Limited inventories
Healing can take several turns (there's also no wait/compress until healed option outside of battle)
Overwhelming amount of chars to select from right from the start (many will decline early on though)
Silly item name announcer
Mission timer (1 day in-game=around 2 hours IRL)
Killed enemies quickly turn into skeletons and dissipate (unusually cartoony compared to the rest of the game)
Chars will generally spot items when you move close but sometimes you have to examine environments thoroughly (without visual clues and it's time consuming)
Chars need to stand close to each other to trade items even in exploration mode
Energy/stamina stat - if it depletes the char will collapse and keep doing it until you use time compression to restore their energy a bit (looks funny but can get rather tedious at times)
Need to get pretty close to spot enemies
Pretty slow character stats progression (you're expected to trade up to better and more expensive chars over the course of the game)
Persistent gear
You can hire a native guide for free via the boss (will comment on each new area with a heavy accent providing lore/personality and some gameplay tips) - however you have to keep an empty team slot for the event to trigger and it's not guaranteed
Huge penalty for not making it back to a conquered area before a day ends (several mercs will generally die and because of this some of the mercs that didn't are likely to resign)
Can't sell or buy gear or ammo (except by hiring mercs equipped with what you want)
Can't make mercs turn around without also moving
Pretty rare (and semi-randomized) gun drops from killed enemies
Melee attacks require a surprising amount of AP (I've run up to an enemy around a corner and then back again while not being able to actually attack)
No nighttime combat
Permanent stat losses (critical hits and health points lost when below 15 HP)
Can't repair items in the field
Random element to enemy AI (indoors enemies sometimes come out when near the door but other times they'll stay inside until you open the door regardless of if you shot at or threw a grenade at the door (unless it's wooden in which case it's destroyed))
Merc salary increases aren't proportionate to their stat increases between level ups (aka "experience class"; they become better at detection and stealth though and a small hidden bonus to skills is applied)
You can get around the "aggressive/obsessive" behavior of some mercs (the merc won't respond to any order other than shooting the previously picked enemy until it's dead; Leech and Fidel for example) by removing the weapon from their main hand
The final "vest" (ultra shield) gives very good protection but has no pockets
-
No tutorial and you can't contact your boss during a mission to report your status or ask for help
Can't save after setting up (equipment and training) but before starting a mission/setting out - especially annoying when you want to replace someone and remove their equipment at the same time, squad movement stops during fast forward/time compression (wtf?)
Guns jam too easily (can usually be unjammed fairly quickly but it can make you lose mercs if you're unlucky and playing aggressively)
The enemy AI has a tendency of not attacking with the last one or two soldiers in a sector and of running away with its last soldiers when they are badly hurt (slows down the pacing by a lot since the enemy AI will never actually retreat from a sector)
Hard to replenish health (you only get ~10% back per day from resting and you can't rest or use items in-game to regain health (need to keep a doctor with a healing item (which will be drained) in the base and make hurt mercs their patients) - since health affects action points and how easily a merc gets knocked out you can easily find yourself in a downward spiral after doing well for the first 2-3 days on Normal (the limited funds and having to capture more processing plants to increase your income per day is another big factor, cpu guards and even some mercs quitting if you don't do well enough is another big factor - the cpu guard stock takes time to replenish and enemy attacks on your areas will rather suddenly increase by a lot, the poisoned water supply is yet another big factor))
Seemingly random chance of your CPU guards surviving an attack on their own (I've seen 2 enemy soldiers take out 4 guards and at one point unguarded tappers winning against enemy soldiers) - what sucks about these fights is that you can't predict them nor can you come to your guards' aid during one of them
Can't cancel a chosen deployment sector when planning before a mission
Can't make mercs help other mercs that are drowning or fighting off a snake
Sometimes bad pathfinding (if you make the entire team move somewhere on a map with bridges and water they can get stuck on the bridge or try to swim when it could kill them)
Interface/control problems (flowers don't stack, can't skip the drowning cutscene or go to options during the enemy's turn, sometimes can't use escape to go back to th previous menu/screen, the mouse cursor automatically moves to the "done" button when a new turn starts making it fairly easy to skip another one by accident - particularly when moving between areas in zoomed out/sector map mode, keys/notes take up a full inventory slot (keys of the same type stack (but only up to 5) and if you're trying to open a door while the right key is in the merc's inventory it'll be used automatically) - it's also fairly easy to end up with a bunch of unusable keys if you use lockpicking a lot (it's not always the case that a key only works in the sector it was found in from what I can tell)
Can't skip movement animations
Pretty tedious inventory management (could've been made smoother in exploration mode or they could've made it so that items in conquered areas are put in your team inventory automatically)
Need to examine item containers twice to take the item (if empty the char says to but if not it goes "hmm" and you have to look again)
Lacking tooltips (can only examine items - not mechanics or feature buttons)
Game doesn't let you start moving towards a destination if you clicked an item or interactive object and the char doesn't have enough action points (another problem that this causes is that you can't move to tiles with an item on them without issuing an order to move past the tile and using Esc to stop moving to end up on that tile)
Annoying pauses when chars talk and some delay when trying to skip the dialogue (certain characters have quirks that for example make them scared when alone or not follow orders for one turn and their dialogue is always the same)
Uneven visuals (pretty good portraits and menus, decent cutscene and items art, bad in-game sprites and backgrounds, somewhat hard to read font)
No translation of Ivan's dialogue (the subtitles are in russian too)
Characters look nearly identical in the in-game view
Hard to spot doors from certain angles (should've let you rotate or tilt the view, or make them flash like items do)
Fast scrolling is way too fast (modern PC issue?)
Kinda slow paced (can miss attacks fairly easily even with high stats plus good gear (in an inconsistent way - sometimes you'll do great against a couple of enemies but if you take losses later in the battle and reload the save you might do much worse against the same enemies just based on luck) and enemies take several shots to kill even early on)
Trial & error (poor directions for some sub objectives (tombstone, tree virus cure), canteens (water) auto refill in the morning, hard to detect later traps even with explosive or mechanics experts (tedious to use the mine detector during battle), having a healthy and energized enough merc when opening crates (you waste energy by trying to open them) - helps to use a crowbar though, near the beginning your mercs will be weakened by a poisoned water supply - unless you knew about this and which sectors you need to conquer there's a pretty big difficulty spike early on, the enemy can blow up their processing plants if you don't finish those areas in the right way - need to lockpick the front door at the first one you encounter (generally you need to use silencers on your guns and there's a detonator you can find and disarm, each one has a soldier with a remote control over the detonator - can't tell who?) - however they'll rebuild it after a few days so you can try again, you can sometimes walk right into an encounter with heavily armed enemies when moving into a new area, various mechanics, some unintuitive stat effects and how you train some individual stats, need to keep track of wounds that keep damaging chars over time as there's no indicator to remind you of them later)
Can't simply ask mercs to leave or take a break - must fire them (which pisses them off and makes some (most?) of them not want to work for you again)
Mercs can decide to take a vacation (for 1-2 weeks) if they're carrying too much found money in-game
At least 10+ mercs are redundant apart from their personality
Some locked rooms and hard to open crates that are also empty
In some later battles the enemies always get to interrupt your turn and shoot first
Dropped items can end up unreachable if you drop several items on top of each other (making them spread out instead of stack) in narrow areas
Can't attack in melee without a melee weapon
Bugs:
-The tree virus mission can glitch out (your boss forgets that you've already collected flowers) - Only 2 of 4 collected flowers are spent when you first collected them and Brenda talks about it so you can put the remaining 2 in the inventory on the next day and return with flowers again,
-The travel menu sometimes won't appear for seemingly no reason - Haven't found a quick fix but moving around and checking inventories or speeding up time will eventually fix it; you can also hold LMB and move in the direction you want to travel when the squad is in position (seems much more reliable)
-Sometimes you can't travel despite being near a sector's edge and having everyone grouped together - generally solved by moving around a bit and trying again
-There's a rare bug related to travel which makes it trigger during battles (when it happened to me the squad traveled back to where I entered the unconquered sector from),
-It's sometimes possible to trade items at long range (make the receiving merc go open a door/use a key/lockpick while holding an item in the first merc's inventory screen (should pause the game normally) - the item will tranfer to the other merc) - I wasn't able to reproduce this one
Comment:
Sadly it's a mixed bag. The game is very ambitious and innovative for its time, and I enjoyed the characters and managing my team a lot, but it's brutally hard with a fairly dated interface and a lot of downtime between its interesting parts in the form of inventory management and simply moving around the map.
Good: You get to hire and level up a squad of up to 8 mercs (out of 60 different ones, fully voiced and each with their own personality quirks affecting gameplay) which can be replaced at any point, as well as manage CPU controlled guards and workers in conquered territory to be able to fund your team. There are sidequests, some with alternate solutions and you can spy on enemy guards for clues to some of them using a probe. You get to choose which sector to attack, when and from which direction on the world map, and you can escape and re-enter battles as long as you can make it to the edge of the sector with a gathered party. There's a real time element in the form of a day/night cycle - you move out in the morning and need to make it back to a conquered sector before nighttime. If you're finished for the day or need to regain stamina (mercs will move slower and eventually collapse when it's drained), there's a fast forward option you can use outside of battle. Movement is also in real time outside of battle and you can move the entire squad at once like in an RTS, which is kind of neat for 1994. Another cool thing is that you need to use stealth to capture certain sectors with processing plants in them, which give a boost to your economy, or the enemy will blow the plant up with an in-battle soldier using a remote control. It's also not a huge setback if it does get blown up as it will eventually be repaired. Finally the ending can change depending on a couple of actions you take in-game.
Bad: Besides what I mentioned above, you pretty much need to read the manual thoroughly as well as watch part of some LP before playing or you'll probably walk into the game spending too much money, slowly killing everyone off and ending up having to restart after several hours of play. This is because the game can hit you with a lot of unexpected events early on, like your water supply getting poisoned and you having to figure out which sectors to conquer to fix this without much direction, or the CPU guards and workers (and even your mercs) suddenly quitting if you're not doing well enough.
In combat, the game can get annoyingly random by letting the enemy hit your mercs while you can't hit back even with great aiming skills and gear, and your guns also tend to get jammed for a few turns even in pretty good condition (almost everything deteriorates actually, but since you can leave a merc in the base to repair things it's not much of an issue except for the guns jamming). At other times, or after reloading the quicksave, everything might go your way instead. But in general the enemies have an easier time hitting than you do.
Speaking of the enemies, they have a tendency to start running away when low on HP, but never actually retreating from the sector, which can lead to drawn out segments of slowly chasing down the last enemy in a sector. This becomes really tedious with hurt mercs since they lose action points as they lose health, plus their move animation becomes much slower and can't be skipped. Sadly the fast forward option also can't be used to move faster during exploration, making you spend a lot more time with moving around the world map and collecting loot than you'd want to. There are other flaws about the interface that bothered me, but then again I'm picky about that stuff.
Finally I have to mention the swimming, which is a nightmare. If you do play the game, just avoid deep water if you can, as it's very likely that a merc will drown from a random snake attack while swimming just a short distance and it also takes a toll on your gear. It helps to bring a knife for the merc to fight the snake with, but you'll still have to watch a slow animation and will lose a bunch of health and stamina from it. You also can't send someone else in to help the merc from drowning, other than giving them bottled water with which to replenish some stamina.