Not for Kids?

More of the human touch

The game has an all over human flavour - in the town of Cambria, after you liberate it by killing the six or eight pistol and shotgun toting enemies, the people of the town come out of their houses, some of them. Terry, with long hair in a wheelchair, he stays in his locked house and you can talk to him through a window - he thinks the evil queen Dierdrianna should have been assassinated a long time ago. These people will have errands, quests for you to do, but instead of the usual one paragraph "save my boy," Martha, mother of the missing Joey, prattles on and on about her boy and where he might have gone. The game is filled with these little touches, and they really wrap you up in the narrative and the surroundings.

Raiding some kind of computer lab - is it the FiringSquad testbed?

Order some flowers for the Queen - maybe you can patch things up.

Adult themes (no not [s]Cinemax)

Jagged Alliance 2 is an adult game before it resorts to explicit gore or sex. There are mature themes of politics and human suffering brought to bear as the characters themselves explain to you why it is you should save them, or go to hell trying. Early in the game, you walk into a building filled with children working on an assembly line. Turns out you're in a sweatshop, and if you pop a cap in the head of the woman running the joint, you'll liberate these children from textile slavery. There's porn shops and underground government torture chambers. If you leave dead bodies laying around town long enough, carrion birds begin eating away at the corpses. After so many games where dead bodies just dissolve after being shot, this seems so smart. Duh - bodies don't just disappear. When you kill people, they lay there in a puddle until someone does something about it. (Fortunately, the game handles item pickup very well: you can distribute the spoils of war from a general sector-by-sector inventory screen, or pick them up since they glow red when a slain enemy falls - there are none of the bodies/item problems that Nat described in Shadow Company).

At the Cambria Hospital: I didn't need to see that, thanks.

What the hell?