Grand Chien is a country with diamond mines, a missing president, and a paramilitary force called the Legion running the countryside. Into that mess steps the player, a mercenary leader known as “Boss,” hired by the president’s daughter Emma to find her father and put the country back together. That is the setup of Jagged Alliance 3, and the game earns it.
Haemimont Games built Jagged Alliance 3 as a turn-based tactics game played from an isometric perspective. It came out in 2023, published by THQ Nordic, first on Windows and later on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. It is the fourteenth entry in the Jagged Alliance series and the first mainline entry since Jagged Alliance 2. It scores 8.6 out of 10.
Trailer, via THQ Nordic.
A Roster of 40 Mercenaries, Each With a Temper
The game’s central asset is its cast. Jagged Alliance 3 ships with a roster of 40 mercenaries, and each one has a backstory and a personality. Several are returning characters from earlier games, including Vicki Waters, Ivan Dolvich and Fidel Dahan. The rest are new.
That roster is not a cosmetic list. Mercenaries have their own strengths and weaknesses. They also have preferences about who they will and will not work with. Building a squad is therefore a negotiation with people who have opinions, not a matter of slotting the highest stat into an empty chair.
Players recruit from the Association of Internal Mercenaries, or A.I.M. The game takes place three years after Jagged Alliance 2, and the roster mixes past mercenaries with brand new ones. The result is a cast that carries history without requiring the player to have lived through it.
Grand Chien, French for “Big Dog”
The setting does real work here. Grand Chien is a fictional country in Africa, originally a French colony. It fought against Germany during the Second World War and kept relics from that conflict, including bunkers and weapons. It gained independence from France after the war and kept a mixture of French and German names.
The terrain varies. There are towns and villages, farmlands, swamps, highlands, savannas, and river jungle deltas. The economy rests mostly on agriculture, tourism and diamond mining. Conflicts in the game reflect those differences in terrain, and weather conditions shift too. Some fights feature wild animals.
This is a game that understands a battlefield is a place before it is an arena. Mountains, swamps and savannahs do not play the same way, and Jagged Alliance 3 does not pretend they do. The country’s colonial residue — the bunkers, the weapons, the mixed names — gives the fighting a context that most tactics games skip.
The Strategic Map and the Intel It Feeds You
Jagged Alliance 3 runs on two layers. The first is a dynamic strategic map where players move mercenaries, conduct operations, and review active missions, enemy activity, and intel they have acquired. The second is tactical exploration, which is where the turn-based combat happens.
The two layers talk to each other. The strategic map supplies context about each individual battle and about how enemy forces react as the player attempts to retake territory. Intel accumulates as the campaign progresses, and that intel unlocks additional side missions and opportunities.
That structure is the game’s spine. A tactics game lives or dies on whether the fights matter, and here they do, because the map keeps a record of what each one changed. Players can also approach combat with stealth to weaken enemies before the shooting starts.
Weapons, Body Parts and Loot
Combat is granular. Players issue commands to a squad, and mercenaries can aim at individual body parts of an enemy. Weapons can be customized. A wide selection of real-world firearms and melee weapons is available, and most of them can be enhanced with upgrades. Armour, tools, explosives and grenades round out the kit for combat and other situations.
Enemies can be looted for their resources. As mercenaries level up, they unlock new skills and abilities. The game also features a cooperative multiplayer mode.
The body-part aiming is the detail that separates Jagged Alliance 3 from the broader tactics field. It turns every encounter into a set of trade-offs: take the sure shot, or take the shot that ends the fight faster if it lands. That is a real decision, and the game asks it constantly.
A Kidnapping, a Corporation and a Conspiracy
The plot has more moving parts than the pitch suggests. In 2001, Alphonse LaFontaine, president of Grand Chien, is kidnapped by the Legion, a rogue paramilitary force. The Legion is led by a mysterious figurehead known only as “The Major.” It demands control of the country’s mines and threatens to kill Alphonse if his government interferes.
Emma, Alphonse’s daughter, is worried about her father and worried that his political enemies will exploit the situation. She seeks help from the Boss and provides funds to recruit mercenaries. She asks them to stop the Legion and rescue her father.
To help the operation, Emma has the Boss work with Corazon Santiago, a representative of the Adonis Corporation. Adonis agrees to fund the mission on the condition that the team retakes the country’s mines for the company.
The team secures a small island as a forward base, then learns that Adonis originally hired mercenaries from the More Economic Recruiting Center, or M.E.R.C., to deal with the Legion. That group was led by the company’s founder, Biff Aspcott, a former A.I.M. mercenary, and it went missing after heading for the mainland.
From there the campaign widens. The Boss’ team deals with criminal outfits, a communist cell, a disease outbreak, and various other problems from the local populace. The Boss finds evidence that Corazon and the Major know each other. Biff, rescued from an attack, reveals that the Legion’s leader is Spike Scallion, a former A.I.M. mercenary who had been working in North Korea, and that Adonis hired him to secure control of Grand Chien’s mines because Alphonse was proving problematic.
Hire mercenaries, meet interesting characters, and fight in tactically deep turn-based combat in this true successor to a beloved franchise.
That is a lot of conspiracy for one campaign, and it mostly holds. The through-line is money and minerals: Adonis wants the mines, the Legion wants the mines, and the president is in the way. The mercenaries are the only people in the country who are paid to care about something else.
What the Two-Layer Structure Gets Right
The best argument for Jagged Alliance 3 is that its systems are honest with each other. The strategic map does not exist to decorate the tactical combat. It exists because retaking a country is a sequence of choices about where to be, and the game makes you live with them.
The intel system rewards attention. Players who read the map and follow the threads get side missions and opportunities that others will never see. That is a meaningful reward for engagement, and it fits a game about a country full of problems that are not all the same problem.
The mercenary preferences add friction in the right place. A squad is a group of people with grudges and favourites, and the game makes you manage that before you manage the enemy. It is a small system with a large effect on how the campaign feels.
The weaknesses are structural rather than dramatic. A 40-mercenary roster is a lot of people to keep distinct, and the game leans on backstory and quirk to do it. The conspiracy plot, with Adonis, M.E.R.C., the Major and Spike Scallion stacked on top of each other, asks the player to hold a lot of names in their head while also holding a lot of tactical ground.
The Setting Is the Best Character
Grand Chien is the part of Jagged Alliance 3 that will stay with players longest. A former French colony that fought Germany, kept the bunkers, and then built an economy on agriculture, tourism and diamond mining is a specific place, not a generic warzone. The mixture of French and German names is a small touch that does a lot of work.
The terrain variety backs it up. Swamps, savannahs, highlands, river jungle deltas and urban environments each change how a fight unfolds, and weather conditions add another variable. Wild animals show up in some conflicts. None of this is decoration. It is the reason two battles in Jagged Alliance 3 do not feel like the same battle.
The game also takes the diamond mines seriously as an object of desire. Three separate parties want them. That is a clean piece of design: one resource, several claimants, and a player caught in the middle of all of them.
What Jagged Alliance 3 Gets Done
Jagged Alliance 3 is the first mainline entry in the series since Jagged Alliance 2, and it carries that weight without buckling. Haemimont Games built a tactics game with two layers that respect each other, a roster of 40 mercenaries with actual personalities, and a setting with enough texture to justify the campaign’s length. The cooperative multiplayer mode extends the life of it.
The conspiracy plot is overstuffed and the roster is large enough that some mercenaries will blur together. Those are real costs. But the core loop — read the map, pick the squad, take the ground, live with the result — is strong, and the body-part aiming and weapon customization give every fight a decision worth making.
This is the successor the franchise needed, and it is a tactics game worth the time of anyone who wants one with a country attached to it.
KEY FACTS
– Release year: 2023
– Developer: Haemimont Games
– Publisher: THQ Nordic
– Platforms: PC (Microsoft Windows), PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S
– Series position: fourteenth entry, first mainline entry since Jagged Alliance 2
– Mercenary roster: 40
– Modes: single player, multiplayer, co-operative
– Score: 8.6/10
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