I have many fond memories of Jagged Alliance. From the excellent voice acting to the incredible story telling and cinematic visuals, the game I remember was one which was damn near perfect on so many levels. How does the game actually stack up against all those years of nostalgia?

Not all that well, unfortunately. Jagged Alliance has, in fact, aged very poorly. While the voice acting is still one of the greatest highlights of the game due to its diversity and clarity, the visuals and controls of the title are like bitter age lines on what was once a stunning title at the time of its release.

The introductory sequences are still tolerable, with the visuals taking on an almost comic-book quality. While you can probably count the pixels in these scenes on one hand, they still get their point across, mainly due to the strength of the voice acting and general strong composition of the scenes.

Jagged Alliance tasks players with gaining control over the island of Metavira, an island where Fallow trees with special medical qualities grow. Your job is to secure the island for Jack Richards and his daughter, Brenda – who have both realised that it probably wasn't a good idea to allow Brenda's former scientific partner, Lucas Santino to share the island. In order to do this, you must hire operatives and manage resources (guards, workers, and cash) in order to secure sectors of the island and ensure that the scientific research can continue.

The game blends turn based strategy and role playing elements, with players able to recruit a vast team of mercenaries to clear the island, sector by sector. Each mercenary has a unique skill set, creating a lot of indecision when deciding who to take on a mission to liberate a particular sector. As long as you've got a few people capable of using firearms efficiently, and a medic or two, there shouldn't be all that many problems. If there are, you can always wait for your characters to gain new skills as you fight your way through the island.

While the gameplay is still engaging and extraordinarily deep, it's sadly let down by poor graphics and controls that feel creaky and obsolete. There is no box select, so you can only control one mercenary at a time (not that this matters when you're in combat), but having to individually select each of your mercs just to move them to another sector is frustrating, not to mention time consuming.

Combat is pretty smooth, based on a tactical point and click affair in which luck plays a huge role. Sometimes you'll hit the enemy, other times you'll hit trees. It works both ways though, with enemies sometimes getting caught in their own crossfire, helping the game feel authentic and tense. Your mercs will make mistakes, too, which helps give the game a certain sense of authenticity. This shines through in not only their combat actions, but also their personalities, which can conflict with one another in many, many ways.

Jagged Alliance is like the old wise man that you go to in order to seek counsel, but walk away from feeling a little bit disappointed. The game is still good, but it isn't spectacular. The shininess that it once had is now covered in dirt, and there's no way to remove the ugliness. Jagged Alliance does remain one of the most complex games ever released, but the attention that it demands (and the years of design-dust that you have to sift through) to enjoy the title probably say one simple thing – we aren't as patient as what we once were with games.

You probably won't be able to find the game anywhere in boxed form nowadays (short of e-bay or other second hand markets), but it has been re-released in many flavours. There is the standard gog.com route you could go down, or if you're feeling adventurous, you could always try to get your hands on the (fairly) recent re-release of the game on the Nintendo DS, which is said to be a faithful reproduction of the original game.