Excellent turn-based RPG that honors the original

Great Game! Never played JA1 or 2, but really enjoying my time with this.
I would say the weakest aspect of the game is the Setting. Personally I find it rather uncreative.

Civil War in a 3rd World Country, go and save the day.

But other than that, it's an amazing game. It's got a ton of Mechanics that make the game very interesting on a Tactical and Strategical Level.

Managing Time, Contracts, Equipment, ensuring your Mercenaries have their needs met (Challenges, Wounds, R&R, one Merc quit on me because he wasn't seeing enough action - what a Psycho), choosing the right equipment, gaining the Support of local Towns by protecting them from the bad guys or helping them with Quests, etc.

The game offers a lot and does it very well!

All in all, 9/10. Definite recommendation if you can look past the overdone Setting of the game.

The only other thing I don't like is how the M82 Sniper Rifle loaded with .50 Caliber Ammo does not kill a Soldier with a Headshot when he wears a Helmet. You have to load the Armor Penetrating .50 Caliber Ammo for that. I get it from a Gameplay PoV, but it still feels wrong.

I was thinking that the normal .50 Caliber would surely be enough to kill any Human Target and the Armor Penetrating Variant would be needed for armored Vehicles or something but unfortunately no Vehicles so far. :(

Turn-based tactics games exist by the hundreds, but what has always set apart the Jagged Alliance franchise from the rest was its characters, its personality. Significant development time has gone into making these piles of numbers into actual characters that don't simply exist to please you, the player, but that plausibly have their own lifes, their own preferences and dislikes, with at best tangential effects on the raw gameplay.

JA3 does this and then some. In many ways, it bridges past and present. It brings back old favourite characters and introduces new ones. The combat system has been updated to the now unbiquitous X-Com model of partial/full cover but in true JA tradition, missing shots can still hit another target instead of just disappearing.

The moment that sold me, though, was when I ordered my merc to go somehwere with a low table sticking out into the path between start and end. Instead of walking around that bit of cover like any other tactics game would do it, my merc just did a shoulder roll over that cover and smoothly slid into the final position! Jaded gamer though I am, that got me really excited and I knew then that JA3 was finally the worthy successor to JA2.

That being said, not all modernizations are unequivocally positive because they inevitably came with tradeoffs. While the incredible JA2 grind of looting a post-battle map is gone, the price to pay for that is that maps are much smaller and instead of going through every box and drawer, the game straight up shows you the containers that hold the loot. Negatively speaking, it replaced tedium with handholding.

Combat wounds and equipment wear still have to be fixed between battles, but you barely need any items for that, and is much faster than before. In JA2, having a merc survive with serious wounds or broken gear presented the player with tough choices: How much of my carry capacity do I spend on medical/mechanical equipment? How long do I spend fixing the problems, maybe I can get away with restoring things to less than perfect condition? These seem to be much lesser concerns in JA3.

Then there are preference matters. My favourite way of playing JA2 was sneaking and killing from stealth. At least for now, in the very early game of JA3, I haven't quite made it work yet. I hope I will be able to.

One thing I can confirm I don't like is the pace of gear progression. In JA2, it was not uncommon to fight the first few maps with pistols only. Every upgrade, from the first shotgun to SMGs to finally the bread and butter assault/sniper rifles took a while and felt exciting, like a meaningful upgrade. The heaviest, most exotic weapons were a matter for mid to late game, so there were always some new toys to strive for. In JA3, however, I just finished the starting island of 6 or 7 small maps, and I already have several AK-47s, more heavy machine guns than squad members, and a whole ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ rocket launcher. I fully expect to get the trailer-advertised mortars to arrive in a few more maps, and then what? Again, I suspect the specter of modernization at work here, to satisfy the ever-growing demand for instant gratification which can at best only be a side-grade from JA2.

Overall, however, JA3 is a worthy successor to the franchise. And did I mention there is a free demo? If you are still on the fence, the demo will, I believe, tell you most of what you need to know to make a good purchase decision.