Jagged Alliance 2: Unfinished Business

Some games invite you into their world like a long-lost friend, feeding, nurturing and entertaining you - sometimes even encouraging you to stay the night. This one makes you feel about as welcome as a vice cop at an E3 after-party.

A supposedly stand-alone add-on to the popular turn-based strategy/RPG Jagged Alliance 2, Unfinished Business retains the mercenary squads and B-grade action themes of its parent game while slimming down the resource management. It also seems to go out of its way to alienate anyone who's not a veteran of the series. The game opens with a forlornly dated intro section, in which a character creation option and several reams of background information are cleverly concealed within an unfortunate web/email-style interface. At this stage you're asked to assemble a team of up to six mercenaries based on their specialised skills, experience and hiring cost. With no real indication of what is required of you in the mission, your decision really comes down to choosing the meres with the funniest accents, and in this respect you are totally spoilt for choice.

Half an hour of reading and menu-wrangling later, the isometric action begins, dumping your team on an island with a mission to halt a missile strike. Another ten minutes later, they'll all be dead. Unless, of course, you already knew exactly what you were doing. There's no such thing as a learning curve here - it's a relentless uphill battle from beginning to end, with turn-based combat interspersed with exploration and infiltration. Newcomers will be immediately put off, and the outdated graphics and murky interface offer little reason ever to return.

Jagged Alliance vets may find some gratification here, provided they are prepared for an insane degree of difficulty; but with a true sequel on the way, promising full multiplayer capabilities, Unfinished Business is far from essential.