Played the original for hundreds of hours 20 years ago, thought I'd try this for a bit of nostalgia. It was fun until mid-late game, now it's unplayable. It goes like this, your mercs invade a sector and kill 10 of the 20 or so bad guys, similar to original JA2. Then the remaining 10 all go into hiding inside buildings, in corners, on roofs etc... What follows will be a process of sneaking your mercs around until one of them gets one turn killed, then you'll reload a save, and determine how to possibly approach the hidden stationary enemy without triggering their interrupt. You'll fail dozens of times. You'll reload dozens of times. Eventually you figure it out and eliminate one of the remaining 10 hidden enemies. Repeat for the now 9 remaining enemies, until the sector is cleared. Sound like fun? I can't imagine playing this version on ironman.

STAY AWAY

Stick with the original or better yet get the 1.13 mod.

Wildfire doesn't really do anything better than 1.13 and is inferior in many ways. I've read people are having a lot of trouble getting it to run with Windows 10, but let me tell you it is no picnic with Windows 8.1 either. For example, in the final map with Deidranna I had to ALT/TAB out of the game and close the game about 20 times because it kept getting stuck on the civilian's turn and didn't go anywhere. It also happened when I shot Deidranna and once again closing the game a few times I got the ending animation.....where it again got stuck, and at that point I figured I had wasted too much time on the game already.

If some masochist decides to play this through like me, I would like to give a friendly tip: stock up on LAWS and Mortar Shells for Medina because not only have they artificially increased the difficulty by increasing the number of soldiers throughout the game, but they have also significantly increased the amount of tanks. What does this mean in practice? Well, if you aren't a fortune teller and did not have the foresight to stock up on said armaments, you won't be able to even capture Medina and will have to use the old travel via the edge of the map trick to get to Deidranna.

Wildfire is a massive community-made mod for JA2... and it really shows.

- It adds tons of new guns to the game, with zero balancing done, so 90% are completely useless and/or nonsensical.

- Writing and voice-acting changes are outright horrible.

- Enemies swarm you at every opportunity. There's zero sense of tactics or morale effects from the AI behavior.
For example, you just absolutely decimated a group of 30 enemies in one chokepoint and a barely trained soldier with a handgun just rushes out at you, while stepping over the massive pile of bodies like nothing happened.
The game feels more like a zombie shooter, than anything else. Except the zombies have guns and hit you regularly at ranges that are considered too long for your rifles. (again, zero balancing)

- Overall difficulty was probably designed by a toxic 8yo troll as a joke. If you like to suffer, go ahead and play, but this mod can not be considered by any sane person as "fun". You're constantly being forced to exploit the brain-dead AI and cheese the game, which some people falsely refer to as "thinking outside the box".

I played my share of Jagged Alliance games over the decades and god forbid I'd recommend this drivel to any new players.
Do yourself a favor and try JA2 with 1.13 update instead.

This game is for JA veterans only. A first timer does not stand a chance...



Positive: Much more gear, although a lot is useless. New, larger maps (but it's in the negatives as well)



Negative:

- Difficulty set for the kind of people who don't mind re-trying 200 times the same map: Very, very few characters starting with a decent gun. Enemy who snipes you with handguns while your entire team can't manage to get a shot on him with assault guns. Really stupid cover system, way too random (Especially the roof bonus), every map from the beginning is very large, and you are massively outnumbered from the very start. That is the easy mode.....

If you like having fun in your games, forget it. This one is only for people who enjoy pure challenge and don't care about the game itself.

- The re-voicing of some characters absolutely pathetic. Dialogue changes are made by people with no writing talent whatsoever. You already loose a lot of what made JA2 so great.

- The game feels like a very amateurish mod. Patchy, inconsistent (new items and faces have a totally different style of graphics compared to the old ones etc), terrible balance and difficulty management. Calling a quasi-undoable mode 'easy' makes me think to these arrogant teens who plague the MMORPG.

- The maps are so large that you need HOURS just for the very first steps of the game. Exploring the map for loot is as fun as washing every single car in a large parking lot.

- The high resolution graphics, as usual with the amateur mods, only makes everything much, much smaller. Better not have eye fatigue issues.... Come back to the original JA and it all feels soooo comfortable suddenly despite the late 90's graphics.

- The original graphics are dated, but they were proper graphics. The new stuff (especially weapons and the map) uses a better resolution, but look really silly (The new guns are blue?? Nope, it's to show a reflection effect. Are these multicolor LEDs on the guns??? Nope, bad reflection effects, again). The portraits could be allright if they were not in such a different style compared to the ones from the original JA2.

- The characters personnality lost all interest with the new guys. They are just a caricature of the existing content, clearly made by people with no writing skills.

- Iimagine your team in a good ambush position being slaughtered by a few underarmed sitting ducks... It does not always happen, but it does happens regularly.

- If you don't know already every game mechanic by heart, forget it... You won't learn them because you will be slaughtered in no time.

- Nothing more frustrating than a very addictive game making you mad because of some really stupid ideas that ruin everything... Not only you rage-quit, but you rage-quit a game that you want so much to play.

Well, forget it unless you think that the original JA2 is way too easy, and you don't care about anything else but a harder version of JA2 with new maps.

I was addicted to this game when younger and wanted to play it again.
This game is sold as Linux compatible.
It is not.

Maybe if I was a WinE expert, I would have been able to solve the problem. After many tries (I found a JA2 log file related with WinE errors ) I just went a little bit further and then get a popup requesting a SERIAL.
The support team just say "you don't need a serial when you start this game by steam".
Well, thanks for nothing then.

It's pointless to sell a game as linux compatible when all you get is a poorly finished (and not working) WinE workaround.

Not nearly as good as the original JA2, get that one instead.

They removed some old mercs and replaced them with uncharismatic ones, with ridiculous amateurish voice acting on top of it.

New maps are too big, new graphics do not respect the overall style.

Oh, and in my short playthrough I had a bug which, after alt tabing, prevented me from using hotkeys or even selecting another merc. Talk about an "improved" version...

I am a big fan of the original one, and Wildfire is a disgrace.

Trust me, steer clear of this one.

Doesnt start on Win10

Well it's JA2 with new weapons, some new mercs and more realism (no more barrel extender with a steel pipe and some glue).
The story is basically the same but Miguel has an awful new voice for whatever reason. The cities have new spanish sounding names (?).
There are no new quests so don't expect that.
I encountered several bugs later in the game (some game breaking but I was able to load).

I only recommend this game to hardcore JA2 fans though most of them most likely already played it when it was still just a mod. EDIT: After encountering several bugs with the faction system later in the game (Militias attacking civilians for no reason - San Mona incl. Hans & Tony hostile) I retract my recommendation for anyone.

I cannot recommend this game standalone for anyone familiar with the previous titles of JA. It changes too much and practically kicks original JA2 on the face. If you are like me looking to live again the story of freeing Arulco then you need to get JA2:Classic DLC for your Wildfire. It removes all the new content and makes the game like it was supposed to be. All the nasty changes on dialogue, plot, weaponry and map this Wildfire adds require but a little more money to get rid of.

I have fond memories of JA2 and I do recommend the game overall.

I don't recommend this version. They mark it as running on linux, but it uses Proton. Nothing wrong with using Proton, but kind of deceptive since they generally don't mark that with the linux native symbol. Worse, it starts up and asks for a CD key. The 'classic' DLC -- a separate purchase -- works for me, but the 'wildfire' version does not because I don't have the key. Silly me, I assumed a version bought through Steam would run through Steam.