I tend to get bored easily. I play lots of games in my spare time, so if something doesn't pull me fully in by the end of the first hour, then I bounce right off. At most, I can give something another two hours to really try it's best to wow me, and then I shut it off for good. Sorry, but I got limited time on my hands. Thank god I gave this game the extra two hours. Once you get past the classic older game woes of a clunky interface and modern port issues, Jagged Alliance 2 is a fiendishly deep and engrossing military simulator. Jagged Alliance 2 can really be played however you want. It has one goal (kill the dictator, which instantly ends the game), but that goal can be played in an infinite number of ways. You see, Jagged Alliance 2 is a sandbox game wearing the skin of a turn-based military sim, with all sorts of fun strategies on offer. For example, lets say a local city is under control and I wanna liberate it. Okay, I can go in guns blazing... but that might get my guys killed. So what if I go in under the cover of night, kill most of the enemies stationed there, and then bug out if things get hot? What if I run two squads in a location at the same time, with one team covering the other? What if I use artillery and close-range weapons and sniper rifles and... You get the idea. This is a dizzyingly complex game. Every option creates reactions that spiral out into ways you could never see coming, but make sense. This isn't even touching on the unique, fully voiced and incredibly funny mercenaries you play as! The biggest two problems JA2 has are that it's one, slow as balls, and two, fairly clunky. Enemies, player characters, allies and more all move at a snails pace, making game time long unless you manually speed it up. The U.I. is fairly ugly and cluttered, making it hard to adjust to. The tutorial is also not great- read the manual. Once you get past these issues, JA2 becomes a really fun and rewarding experience.
