Hired Guns: The Jagged Edge review

There’s something bizarre about this game where mercenaries battle the forces of an evil dictator in central Africa. No, it’s got nothing to do with the setting at all - it’s that all the female mercenaries we recruited emitted orgasmic noises whenever we clicked on them. Now, however great our effect on women, we fail to believe it stretches so far as to make small digital representations of them climax on demand.

Anyway, the game. Set in Africa, you control a fledgling mercenary force fighting some evil junta for another, potentially less evil, wannabe junta. Something like that, anyway, it isn’t that easy to follow. You do this is in a UFO/Jagged Alliance-style way, spending action points to fire, move, crawl and so on. The main problem is it this game is so very, very, very, very hard.

Really, it’s just ridiculous. The internet provides you with mercenaries to hire and guns to buy, but initially you’ll only be able to buy a handful of guns and a smattering of ammo, so you’ll be very limited in what you can do (like the start of UFO: Enemy Unknown). Then the game gently introduces you to things by forcing your tiny crew, armed only with popguns and a couple of Uzis, to fight an entire army of ridiculously powerful soldiers. There’s also a stupid weariness system that makes your guys fall over with tiredness towards the end of missions.

Hired Guns: Jagged Edge’s difficulty is just ludicrous – it’s tougher than the original X-Com games. It’s just too hard to recommend and, coupled with some of the worst English translation we’ve ever seen, it has to be ignored. While we don’t back down from a challenge, Hired Guns is so tough it’s nearly impossible, and so it’s almost unplayable. Which is sad, because we usually love this type of game.

Jun 29, 2009