Jagged Alliance 3

I had great fun playing this one first without mods and then including some quality-of-life mods. The characters I remember from JA1 and JA2 came alive again for me. I loved that the athmosphere feels so different from Arulco, while many of the game mechanics were only moderised a bit, but stayed recognisable for me.

It's Jagged Alliance 2 with modern graphics. They basically stuck to the tried and tested formula, without making wild decisions. Combat feels great, animations are buttery smooth. Will write more once i got more time on the clock, but after fighting through the the first four sectors i am pretty sure i will have a blast with liberating the rest of Grand Chien. So to all JA2 fans: Yes, this time it's the real deal.

I really liked JA2, but now it's dead to me. JA 3 is its worthy successor, that mixes resource and team management, strategic movement, tactical combat and some RPG elements. It's full of theme, good voiceacting, mercs with personalities, beautiful landscapes, choices, shots and explosions. The world is nicely built and it mostly feels like a real place, despite some sci-fi elements. Tactical combat is the best part of this game: being multi - dimensional, it feels realistic for the most part. It allows for smart pre - deployment, attacks from the unexpected angles, climbing and crawling, sneak kills, placement of explosives beforehand, crossfire ambushes etc. Even though Legion enemies are not the smartest tools in the shed, other well-trained groups handle combat tactics much better. Environment is destructible, though not much else can be done with it. Modding your weapons is pure fun. Quests are diverse and funny for the most part, they have choices and consequences which not only changes the current flow of the game, but affects ending as well. And the change of pace in the midgame is awesome, I just love it. For negatives: inventory management is a time sink and it could have been done much better. Ammo management specifically: when you split your squad, its ammo is split automatically as well, forcing you to manually transfer it back to the main squad, and there are A LOT of ammo types in this game. It's irritating as all get out. Your mercs ocasionally stumble into a mine you already detected. Cancelling squad movement in strategic view makes your mercs go back. Difficulty is on the lower side; I recommend starting at Commando if you have any experience with tactical games. Overall, I had a great time with JA3 as it is and I am rating it 9/10. Even though there is a lot of content here (some good parts were added for free with the latest patch) - I am already looking forward to the DLC with more mercs, more NPCs and more quests before replaying it.

Fun turn based strategy game similar to X-com. Never had any crashes or major issues playing 150+ hours on a 4090 laptop. Visually looks good being set in a third world country, pretty blue beaches and palm trees with piles of trash and old tires floating in the ocean. There is a mod on nexusmods worth checking out (show chance to hit) and you should read some guides on steam. current/final version of the game is patch 1.1.5 and many of the frustrations other reviewers expressed have been addressed.

Jagged Alliance 3 is a fun indie tactics game. I didn't play any of the earlier games in this franchise, so all I can compare it to would be like XCOM 1 & 2. Unlike XCOM, however, JA3 has a roster of fully voiced unique mercs with silly quirks and personalities. Along with its dark humor, the goofy recruitable mercs makes JA3 stand out from other similar games. So you can auto-resolve encounters you'd normally win if your squad is super powerful. The idea of auto-resolving fights with strong squads eliminates any tedium from seeping into this game. This is a very welcome feature for an already long game. Don't worry though, unique encounters cannot be auto-resolved. Unless you're conversing with an NPC, combat consists of almost the entire game. It's a very fulfilling gameplay loop of strategically ordering your squad around during a gunfight, looting defeated enemies and outfitting your squad with increasingly powerful equipment. You'll also intercept random attack squads in order to maintain your presence in the world map. So besides their goofy personalities, as i mentioned earlier, the recruitable mercenaries have a bunch of stats that make them proficient in certain situations. Some heal other mercs, snipe enemies from a distance and use explosives (among other roles). This makes it fun to experiment with different squad combinations. Now i only have a couple issues with Jagged Alliance 3, one of which is fixed by a mod. - So you can't actually view the exact "chance to hit" an enemy. You get some + and - symbols as well as voiced merc feedback to help you estimate how likely you are to hit an enemy. Maybe it's because I only also played XCOM 1 & 2, but this bugged me. Anyways, just search "Show Chance To Hit" in the nexus to fix this. - So the game crashed like 4 times in 50 hours of gameplay. Kinda annoying, but not nearly enough to complain too much. That's all I got. I had a lot of fun playing Jagged Alliance 3 and recommend it!