Much like the original Jagged Alliance before it, Jagged Alliance 2 offers a tremendous mix of strategy and role-playing. Players take charge of a team of mercenaries and attempt to rid the fictional island Arulco of its tyrannical dictator. After recruiting your team from a vast and often entertaining corps of mercenaries (each with his or her own unique personality and verbal quips), you create a merc to represent yourself in the game and then hit the beach on Arulco. The game play is much like the original Jagged Alliance and the earlier X-COM games from Microprose. You control the action from an overhead, isometric angle and move your troops about in real time until an enemy is spotted. At that point, the game shifts into a turn-based mode, where everyone moves and fires their weapons by spending action points. Though the pace is slower and more deliberate than real-time strategy games, the turn-based mode also allows for more tactical planning, and works exceedingly well in this game.
