Jagged Alliance 2 is a tactical role-playing game released in 1999 for Microsoft Windows and later ported to Linux by Tribsoft.

The core game and the Unfinished Business expansion were combined and released under the title Jagged Alliance 2 Gold Pack in 2002.

The game takes place in the fictional country of Arulco, which has been ruled by the ruthless monarch Deidranna for several years.

The player is put in control of hired mercenaries and with aid of local citizens and militia must reclaim Arulco's cities and ultimately defeat Deidranna.

The game received positive scores from reviewers and was praised for its freedom of action, memorable characters and non-linear and tactical gameplay.

The game puts the player in control of several mercenaries that must explore and reclaim towns and territories from enemy forces.

[6] This is the strategic side of the game, as the player directs his forces, and controls the progress of time, which may be sped up or paused.

[9] If the player acquires a ground or aerial vehicle in-game, they may load their troops into it to travel between sectors much faster.

When a merc attacks, they have a certain chance to hit the target depending on the appropriate skill, obstacles in the line of fire and the number of action points spent aiming.

As the game progresses, the online shop[17] offers a larger and better variety of weapons, armour and tools for sale.

[25] Every character has an experience level, five attributes (agility, dexterity, strength, leadership, wisdom) and four skills (marksmanship, explosives, mechanical, medical).

Apart from this, a mercenary can have two (or one highly developed) special skills enhancing a certain aspect of his or her performance such as night operations, or lockpicking.

When a mercenary runs very low on health, the character falls to the ground slowly dying, unable to do anything until medically treated.

[28] In 1988, election candidate Enrico Chivaldori took a wife, Deidranna Reitman of Romania, in order to boost his popularity and consequently was victorious.

[35][36] Omerta suffered a massive raid shortly before the events of the game, leaving the town damaged and nearly deserted.

[37][38][39] The rebel leader Miguel Cordona, former election candidate and opponent of Enrico,[40] guides the player to the city of Drassen.

[43] In an interview with Game.EXE during the game's development, SirTech noted an intention to preserve freedom of movement, character relationships and flexible storyline from the previous title.

[46] Jagged Alliance 2 became a commercial success and, according to designer Ian Currie, was the second-largest hit published by TalonSoft.

[47] By October 1999, Udo Hoffman of PC Player reported that its sales had surpassed 100,000 units in Germany and that distributor TopWare was pleased with the returns.

It debuted at #1 in April 1999 on Germany's computer game sales charts and held the position the following month, before falling to ninth in June.

[48] However, the game flopped in North America: PC Data reported sales of 24,000 for Jagged Alliance II through the end of 1999.

He remarked that team member Chris Camfield placed its sales at 300,000 units by 2006, a figure that Nirvi said "sounds credible".

[51] GameSpot praised its non-linear gameplay, freedom of action and variety of tactics and mercenary character traits,[53] while IGN highlighted its story-telling and role-playing, detailed world, challenging opponents and excellent audio.

[50] The editors of Computer Games wrote, "Sirtech's amazing hybrid of detailed tactical strategy and role-playing delivered the goods.

[66][67] The product appears[vague] to be rushed as the gameplay is virtually the same as the original's, the play-time of Unfinished Business is much shorter, and the plot is linear and thus lacks replayability value.

A renewed commercial release of Wildfire, dubbed version 6, through European publisher Zuxxez Entertainment in 2005 saw the Jagged Alliance series staying on shop shelves more than five years after the debut of its second iteration.

[77] Wild Fire version 6 contains changed sourcecode, a tweaked graphics engine that allows for a higher resolution, introduces new mercenaries and increases squad size from 6 to 10.

[81] The JA2-Stracciatella project aims to add cross platform capabilities for Jagged Alliance 2 by porting the vanilla Wildfire source code to SDL.

In March 2013, the JA2-Stracciatella project was resumed by another developer and transferred to a new repository,[88] which added support for higher resolutions and additional fixes.

[81][91] The main change from the original code is the "externalisation" of many previously hardcoded variables to editable XML files, allowing users a great level of modding flexibility.