I offend you by playing old games (Jagged Alliance)

Hey guys, here I am once again for another installment of my "sort of review old games but not entirely" blog segment! Today we are looking at the 1994 DOS classic, Jagged Alliance, although I am playing the DS version which is just a straight port so it still works. Today we are going to cut the lame initial exposition and go straight into the psuedo-review (which is longer than the other two anyways). But first, let me tell you that it was this or Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor. Did I make the wrong choice? (READ MORE TO FIND OUT)

Unlike the other two games that I have played, where their style of Gameplay is well known enough for me to not detail it, this game probably requires more explaination.
Jagged Alliance, as stated previously, is a turn-based strategy game that was released in 1994 for DOS, but was recently ported to the DS (for full price) and is also available on Good Old Games for $9.99. In it, you lead a group of various badass (and not so badass) mercenaries with different abilities across a grid-based island in order to retake it from the evil scientist people so that the good scientist people can harvest tree sap but in a less evil manner? Yeah, whatever. It's not about the story anyways.

The point is, at the beginning of each game day you can hire from a pool of around 60 unique mercenaries with different stats, equipment, and most importantly: salaries. (and being that this is an early CD game, it's full of fairly cartoony, yet still pretty good voice acting). Then, after you decide to start the day in full, you equip your mercenaries with their stuff, decide who to keep at base for training or medical recovery and deploy your active team into the field. At first you only control one square of the 60 or so grid map, so the objective is to sieze the rest of the island by force, and the more areas you obtain the more money you make from harvesting tree sap. The sim element is kind of cool, but there is no depth to it besides deciding where to put guards in order to protect the harvesters of the tree sap and occasionally giving a merc more marksmanship training (because, aside from agility, Marksmanship and health are the most important stats, but max health can't be increased.)

This is where the actual meat of Jagged Alliance comes into play: the turn-based combat. Your Mercs start at whatever end of the map they entered from and have a limited number of action points to do crap with. Mercenaries with high agility have more action points, therefore making them far more useful than those without a high agility stat (yep, it's one of those weird unbalances that you think playtesting might have fixed.) Anydangways, you can't see enemies until their in your range of sight, and since your mercenaries sight range is an almost arbitrary (water) and unexplained value I found my dudes getting shot repeatedly from guys I couldn't see, even after spreading out my forces to look for him because he was behind a tree or something.

Now this is obviously something that can work both ways, but sometimes the enemy moves out of your sight range again and you have to spend all your action points to get close enough to see him again, at which point you shoot him with another one of your dudes, right? Yeah, except for the fact that about half of the battlezone is covered in trees, which sometimes act as cover and sometimes don't (which is once again, random, even if the shooter had a high marksmanship). So I shoot, and miss about 50% of the time, or I can try to move closer while taking the enemy's "more accurate than your's" potshots (did I mention that your dudes can die really fast in this game unless they have a high max health?).

This would be ok, since it happens to both sides, but a major problem in Jagged Alliance is how stupidly long the battles can take. You have to move your slow-ass guys across the map (with an unskippable and slow animation each time) in order to find and exterminate the enemy, where it might take 5AP to move one square (the average AP amount is around 15). When you encounter the enemy, you have to choose between a Precise Shot, a Normal Shot, and a Rapid Shot, all of which cost different amounts of AP. If you don't have enough AP then the game gives you a big fat YOU DONT HAVE ENOUGH AP message and then you have to click out. After this, you have to click END TURN each time with mouse or stylus, which would seem like it wouldn't be an ordeal, but somehow it is because the interface sucks. The battle maps are big, which helps add to the problem, and in the end it takes me almost an hour to finish one combat scenario (not counting restarts). Almost an hour? That's about how long it takes for the last map of any Advance Wars or Fire Emblem game, but this is every single map.

TL;DR