Blood, sweat and tears

Tactical action jewel that mixes turn based strategic combat, RPG and adventure elements.

You'll start creating your own paid mercenary that will receive the mission of taking Arulco's Island, a country mired in the poverty of the third world and the tyranny of our antagonist, the Queen Deidranna. You have to recruit a small team of mercs, to land on the island and conquer it.

This game is perfectly represented by the sentence "Fight for every span of land", the island is divided into a grid of sectors when we'll find towns, cities, roads, mountains, jungle, beaches, rivers, deserts, military bases, airfields... In them you will fight for every corner, every house, every street.

The combat is incredibly strategic (and hard), you'll need to use urban guerilla tactics, flank the enemy, stealthy raids,... the enemy always outnumber our teams and they will try to abuse of this superiority, they try to flank us aswell, cover terrain, wait for us in good positions... with a numerous enemy group you will need to divide them and have someone ready for crossfire or surprise them, as just wait for them in a spot will result in casualties, specially when you advance in the game and the enemies really improve their aim.

In towns, cities, and key points you have to train the guerilla to help us to defend these spots, a difficult task sometimes. The map island becomes a giant chess board where our troops and the enemy ones move, advance, defend, take positions and fight. Sometimes is better to retire and give up in a sector for later attack from the other side when you have two teams, for example.

The mercs you can recruit are incredibly well represented, with a high level and pretty entertaining dialogues. We have ex military soldiers, escaped rebels, hitmen characters, ... all of them with their own economic pretensions and personal motivations to join us in this war.

Someones are not agree with our team decisions (like to contract other mercs they can't stand) and we have to be careful of this as they can decide not to continue in our side or renew their contracts. We have to know also their drawbacks to not put a claustrophobic merc to fight in a mine, a psycopat will always need extra ammo, etc.

Some mercs are incredibly good at the start (economically impossible for us at the start) and others will be improving while fighting and training. Some of them has great teaching skills and we can use them as trainers for others.

Our 6 men squads have to be balanced, with one of two good doctors, someone who knows explosives and heavy weapons, someone with mechanical abilities to repair the equipment and open locks,traps.. and a pair of good shooters, all of them under someone who has enough leadership. It's essential to keep all of them healthy (bandaging the wounds in combat and applying cure later) and with enough energy (they have to sleep to have a good performance in battlefield).

Money at the beginning it's low at least while we don't ocuppy a pair of mines that will provide a daily income (these mines are capital targets). Also there will be a lack of weapons and ammo initially, but we can buy them online and ship a cargo to the island.

Talking about the weaponry, there is a huge and varied arsenal, starting with simple Desert Eagle, Glock pistols, to shotguns, submachine guns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, full body and head protection, hight vision googles, grenades of all kinds, antipersonal mines and heavy weapons like LAWs, mortars, which will be so useful when we need to face the armored divisions. Weapons are fully customizable with many accessories like sights, silencers...

Enemies also start with pistols and simple equipment but quickly they'll improve so better be prepared with heavy weapons and high piercing ammo when we have to face the true Deidranna's army.

We have aerial support (if we can get them on a sidequest), so we can use it to make raids into enemy territory (if we have previously neutralized their SAM sites, so defended), use it as medic evac, material transport and supply weapons and ammo... but we have to take care of the costs of having a chopper in the air, which is expensive.

The sidequests in this game are pretty varied and they come from a not so obvious hints from secondary characters so we have to be aware and note all these details on a paper, like the old-fashioned way, to know where to find our targets. With these secondary missions we can get more money and rewards, additional mercs, etc.

It's a crude and violent game but with a great dose of humour, specially form our antagonist and from the absolutely genius mercs dialogues (and some secondaries aswell).

It's an EXTREMELY complicate game (I say again, it's really, really hard), and with a steep learning curve. Start a new game without read the manual or watch some youtube tutorials will become into an immediate failure even on lowest difficulty setting. We can always load our game but that's not on the diversion side of this game (same as pretty similar games). When you have a Merc with tons of hours and experience on him, and he/she dies...that's really a hard hit, but that happens easyly in this game and we can only make a memorial to him and put a crown of flowers with his/her name (previoulsy paying this funeral in a webpage, for sure).

It's not a game for everyone, only for those who enjoy tactcal turn based combats and series like Xcom, or Fallout Tactics. It's game that requires a huge micromanagement on the inventory, so you have to put some hours in it to advance.

The game aged well, still looks great nowadays with great animations and scenarios. It's better to play on an small screen instead your 31" Gsync 144Hz, but it's great anyway. Sounds are ok, specially the voices and shooting, and the music becomes a little bit repetitive after dozens of hours in the battlefield.

There is different versions of the game:

- Original one (DLC called "Classic" in Steam), which I recommend for the start.
- With the mod 1.13 which adds tons of improvements and compensations.
- Wildfire (modern version also with improvements but a lot more complicated in my opinion)
- Unfinished Business (Only on Gog, it adds also new mercs, weapons, 10man squads, new plot, editor...)

I would recommend the original GOG version, it's the one I've enjoyed more and includes the manual, OST,... But the Wildfire version + classic DLC here in Steam is like 1 EUR in kep pages.

Totally recommended.