Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Gamigo’s latest round of titles hearkens back to a time when online games were more pastime than  eSport. Turn-based strategy games cater to the type of gamer not out for a cheap adrenal rush, but those who enjoy carefully, meticulously setting up a strategy, seeing how it pans out, rinse, repeat. I was such a gamer. Before EverQuest,  I wiled away my baccalaureate free time playing games like Civilization, Panzer General, and Commandoes, but no game carried away my study time quite like the Jagged Alliance series.

Two parts squad shooter played from an isometric perspective, one part RPG with a nice jolt of oppressive banana republic-breaking story (and a hilarious personality questionnaire that served as a character creator for your core group of mercenaries), Jagged Alliance delivered hours upon hours of meticulously drawn-out tactical fun. Yet (with the exception of the reinvention-minded Civ series) TBS, like space combat sims (and sims at large), is a genre fallen on hard times.

That’s about to change, if Gamigo has anything to say about it. The upstart German developer/publisher that brought you Black Prophecy has acquired its first license and has not one, but two TBS titles in development. UFO Online and Jagged Alliance Online are new browser-based titles built on the Unity 3D engine (which is nothing if not perfectly suited for the stop-start action of a TBS), both are destined for the free-to-play model,  and both have the iso-perspective look that defined the TBS and RPG genres in the nineties, but it’s there that the similarities end. While UFO Online is molded on an alien invasion story with heavy faction-based PvP leanings, Jagged Alliance Online plants us squarely back in Omerta for the same freedom-fighter-for-hire action that I remember and love.
“We really tried to keep the heart of the game… really give the old school gamers what they want, but while adding more modern elements,” noted Gamigo’s Anthony Guzzardo, as I watched him take on a small village chock full of toughs with a 3-man team. Those modern touches included some excellent graphics, complete with dynamic shadows, muzzle flashes, gunsmoke, and model detail right down to the wrinkles on bad guy flannel. Some of the intangibles are already in place, too: the uptempo, fully orchestrated music was a nice blend of modern adventure game and MacGyver episode.