While this game is much better compared with the similar version of this game released in the early 1990s, at the same time, both the sound and the graphics could have been just a bit better; especially the sound.

Have you ever meet a person and you instantly didn't like them but could never figure out why? That's almost what's happening with me and this game's sound. From the first few minutes of playing the game I was disappointed with the sound and it took me over a week of playing the game to finally figure it out.

Hired Guns - The Jagged Edge has all the requirements for a military game. There are gunshots, explosions, the sounds of shattering glass and screams. Actually, if your bullets hit certain surfaces they ricochet and the game included even the sound of ricocheting bullets. Unfortunately that just wasn't enough for me to give this game's sound the two thumbs up. One of the major drawbacks to this game's sound is the background music. It gets redundant rather quickly and with the very slow pace of the game I found myself having to play this game early in the mornings. Every time I played it late night I could not play it for more then thirty minutes without getting up and going to sleep. Maybe it was just coincidence or maybe the music in the game just happens to be sleepy-time music. Another disappointing factor when it came to the sound was the voice acting for the mercenaries. When you select your mercenary they usually say some quick phrase. Also, when scouting an area, when they see an enemy they let you know what they see. Unfortunately when some of the mercenaries speak they sound completely off. For example, the Japanese guy likes to say "I'll get them with my kung fu" way too much. While all the sounds are there, for some reason they just don't seem to fit well in this game.

The graphics themselves were not bad but by today's standards they could have been much better. The actual mission maps look great. The maps offer a variety of terrain for you to fight on and the diversity of each terrain offer the player new strategies to consider. The terrains range from a plain desert area to a crowded train station to a lustful jungle and everything in between. Even the local airport can be turned into a battle zone. While the environment does not look bad at all the rendered soldiers do. There is a noticeable difference in the rendered quality between your mercenary units and the enemies that you are fighting and that bothers me some. Another thing that bothers me when it comes to the units is the fact that all the enemy faces that I've encountered in the game are blocked by the crosshair symbol (a red crosshair indicates that you have line of sight and a grayed out crosshair indicates that there is no line of sight). Line of sight determines your mercs ability to shoot at a target and while I will discuss line of sight and shooting in the gameplay and controls section of the review I do have to make one quick comment about it under this section. While the shooting of a weapon does not look impressive per say (just a quick muzzle flash), what is impressive is where that bullet travels (visually). To give you an example, I was playing some mission and my bullet traveled past my target and hit and shattered a window behind my target. I wish I could say the same thing about explosions but in reality they look rather lame. Yes, they go boom and explode but I've seen much older games with better explosion graphics. I do have to keep in mind that this is actually a turn based game and not an RTS game and as a turn based game I have to admit that the explosions don't look that bad really. Nevertheless, I should say that the strength of this game will not be found in the game's sound or graphics; the strength comes out of the gameplay itself.