Jagged Alliance Flashback Reviews

This is one of those "I am more meh on the game and my review is intended to more have the game's rating be skewed towards neutral than negative" reviews. JA Flashback is an enjoyable lower budget JA game by a small indie team that didn't have much of a budget. The game suffers from some drastic changes (such as handguns having better hit chances than rifles at close range, morale penalty for being outnumbered being especially if fighting solo/small group or shotguns almost always hitting at close range despite visual chance to hit as that's just for the center of the spread) that aren't actually bad but more not actually communicated to the player, this combined with the early game being kind of terrible gear-wise (The game does a very bad job pointing the player towards a good merchant that sells higher end guns or even decent body armor.) which means the early game blind is very annoying for wrong reasons. This game also suffers from some really bad maps for the "unimportant" battles (AKA random stretches of road) and enemy spawns have no restrictions to make sure they don't spawn too close to your squad so you can definitely get extremely unfair battles on the roads where you spawn next to little to no cover and a large enemy force that out numbers you with good gear, basically forcing you into an unwinnable fight, save in multiple slots and trying to fight only in towns is my recommendation. Militia are just auto-resolve only, you don't see them, you can't fight alongside them and if the enemy attacks a town you are inside, the game will auto-resolve all the Militia combat before you start combat. You also can't retreat from encounters which is a baffling missing feature, you can only "retreat" if you move *into* a sector with hostiles, if you enter into a sector and are in battle or the enemy moves into your sector, you can't retreat. That said once you recognise that JA Flashback works different, it is an ok JA game, not the best in the series but not completely awful like some make it out to be. Get it on sale if you want more JA after playing other games.