Jagged Alliance 2

I love this game. It is one of the best, if not THE best. I've played it to death a few years back. Today, January 2, 2019 I felt like playing it again. NO dice. Checked GOG downloads. Saw that an Update was available. Uninstalled. Re-downloaded, reinstalled the 'updated' version. STILL DOES NOT WORK: Horrible shimmering in all menus and all things, like in-game email, mouse trails are forever superimposed on the screen. Unusable, unplayable. Checked all GOG troubleshooting tips. None of them work or even apply to my system. Buy at your own risk. My only hope for replaying this game and having fun is my old laptop which has been sitting on a shelf for some time. But I doubt it. I have been stupid: I have been installing Windows updates on it (though I don't really use the laptop). THERE IS A VERY GOOD CHANCE that the problem is NOT so much with the game, but with what Windows Update fukcs up. Too bad GOG is NOT up to speed. Regardless of whose fault this is, as of right now the game DOES NOT WORK.

This game is simply glorious. Everyone else described the game pretty well, so I'll focus on the mods, which are IMO necessary nowadays. First you've got the 1.13, which is pretty much the base for every other modern JA2 mod, it's impossible to elaborate on it in this short review, but it changes, and more importantly, adds a ton of features, including paradropping on to the battlefield, covert actions, mobile militia and different roles for enemy soldiers and assassins. My personal favorite are mods based on AFS (Arulco Folding Stock), made by Wil473. There are three, aforementioned AFS, which is pretty much regular JA2 campaign with new weapons and gear. Then you've got Urban Chaos 1.13 and Arulco Revisited 1.13, which change the story and maps and are based on classic mods. Then there's AIMNAS, pretty much a constant work in progress, but a very impressive mod nonetheless, it adds massive amounts of gear, but the main highlight of it is the so called big maps project which changes tactical map sizes to behemoths challenging the capabilites of games engine. And finally, Straciatella Project, which basically a bugfixing and OS compatibility mod, doesn't add new features, but tries to iron out any problems with the base game and make it compatible with most modern operating systems. (Seems to me like this description doesn't do it justice, but I've never personally used it, only read about it) If you're interested, go to Bear's Pit, it's the main JA2 modding site, lots of really helpful and giving people over there and there's a couple of other mods to check out as well.

Amazing game. Hard to get to work with 1.13 or stracciatella for mac though. I downloaded it a while back and got it to work. Haven't been able to get i to work with this time around though.

Love it.

Played this to death back in the '00s. Still fun, forgot how slow-paced it is.