Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

Jagged Alliance 2: Gold Pack shines as a masterclass in turn-based tactical warfare, delivering a depth of strategic options that few games can match. At its core, you’ll be managing a band of mercenaries, each with unique skills, personalities, and loyalties. Balancing your squad’s strengths—snipers for long-range, heavy gunners for suppression, medics for healing—becomes a delightful puzzle as you tackle each sector of the oppressive nation of Arulco.

Resource management is key: you’ll need to juggle limited funds for equipment, travel, and squad salaries. The economic aspect feels meaningful, forcing you to make hard choices about stocking up on ammo versus investing in better weapons or saving for crucial reinforcements. This dynamic elevates the tension in every skirmish, knowing that every bullet spent has a cost beyond the immediate firefight.

Jagged Alliance 2’s interface rewards attention to detail. The isometric battlefield allows for cover-based tactics, elevation advantages, and line-of-sight considerations. Characters have fatigue, morale, and concealment stats that affect performance, encouraging careful planning over brute force. Each turn demands thought: do you advance cautiously, set overwatch traps, or push hard to rescue a civilian under fire?

Unfinished Business, the standalone expansion included in this Gold Pack, builds on the formula by introducing new campaign areas and mission types. While it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, it does refine combat pacing with fresh objectives—protect VIPs, secure crash sites, negotiate kidnappings—that keep veteran players on their toes. The expansion also expands the roster of mercs, offering new loadouts and playstyles to explore.

Graphics

Though originally released in 1999, Jagged Alliance 2’s hand-drawn sprites retain a timeless charm. Characters are distinctly animated, with fluid movements and expressive idle stances that help you connect to their on-screen avatars. The isometric tilesets are rich in tactical detail: crates to vault over, windows to shoot through, and terrain features that encourage creative ambushes.

The Gold Pack preserves the original aesthetic, eschewing heavy post-release graphical overhauls in favor of fidelity to the classic look. While veterans might notice the dated textures and lower resolutions by modern standards, the clarity of unit silhouettes and enemy markers ensures that readability is never compromised. It’s a case where functional design trumps flashiness.

Environmental variety is strong across both the base game and the Unfinished Business expansion. You’ll traverse desert outposts, mountain villages, and jungle hideouts, each with its own color palette and tactical considerations. Weather effects, such as dust storms or rain, are subtle but effective additions that can influence sight lines and morale.

Unfinished Business also tweaks certain graphical interfaces—inventory screens and tactical maps are more streamlined, reducing menu clutter and speeding up loot management. These small quality-of-life improvements might go unnoticed at first glance, but they accumulate into smoother mission flow and less time fumbling through nested menus.

Story

The narrative of Jagged Alliance 2 casts you as the newly appointed ruler of Arulco, tasked with deposing the tyrant Queen Deidranna. Rather than a linear tale, the story unfolds organically as you liberate towns, recruit locals, and wrest control from the regime. NPC interactions bring depth: civilians will praise or fear you based on your actions, and mercenaries will bicker or bond depending on their affinities.

Character-driven vignettes are the hallmark of the series. Each mercenary arrives with a backstory—one may be a former special forces operative haunted by the past, another a trigger-happy freelance gunslinger. Confrontations between these personalities can erupt mid-mission, altering squad cohesion or leading to explosive arguments in the tavern between battles. This emergent storytelling keeps you invested far beyond scripted cutscenes.

Unfinished Business offers a more straightforward revenge plot, thrusting you into missions to recapture lost assets and uncover a deeper conspiracy within Arulco’s power structure. While the expansion’s storyline isn’t as sprawling as the base game’s geopolitical intrigue, it provides satisfying closure for players hungry for additional context and final showdowns.

Ultimately, the blend of player choices and mercenary-driven drama makes Jagged Alliance 2’s story uniquely compelling. You aren’t just guiding a protagonist along a fixed path—you are crafting alliances, making moral compromises, and experiencing the consequences of each tactical decision on the people of Arulco.

Overall Experience

Jagged Alliance 2: Gold Pack remains a benchmark for tactical RPGs more than two decades after its original release. Its intricate combat systems, combined with the mercenary management meta-game, offer unparalleled replay value. Each playthrough feels different, driven by the unpredictable chemistry—or chaos—of your hired guns.

The Gold Pack’s inclusion of Unfinished Business is a welcome bonus that extends the lifespan of your campaign. While it doesn’t overhaul the formula, it injects new challenges and diversifies mission structures, ensuring that seasoned commanders can return for fresh encounters. The improved interfaces and additional mercs make the expansion feel like an essential companion rather than an afterthought.

Players seeking modern visuals or seamless online play may find the classic engine somewhat archaic, but for those who crave deep strategic gameplay and memorable characters, the trade-off is more than worthwhile. Community-made mods and fan patches further enhance compatibility on contemporary systems and introduce quality-of-life tweaks, cementing the game’s enduring appeal.

In sum, Jagged Alliance 2: Gold Pack stands as a timeless relic of tactical genius. Its challenging scenarios, coupled with living, breathing mercenaries, craft a journey that feels both personal and epic. Whether you’re a veteran commander revisiting Arulco or a newcomer eager for hardcore strategy, this compilation delivers an experience that remains as riveting today as it was at launch.

Retro Replay Score

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