Took IMP (I agree: Super boring. I only took for the no salary Leadership that's used to train militia in background while everyone else actually gets played), Fox, Mouse (Yes, I know she takes a moral penalty when paired with Fox, but her dialog for it is hilarious), Livewire, and Ukranian chick (Will need explosives expert). Cleared tutorial island (good mix of objectives and enviroments), then took first mine (south) and docks with just Mouse sneak killing. I appreciate that you have at least two viable first targets after the tutorial, since JA2 really funneled you Drassen>Alma>Cambria (You could go Cambria before Alma, but it's blatantly exposed).
Mechanics wise, there's a few quibbles . I have a few small quibbles: Sneak attack kill and hit rate really should be boosted out of combat, and pausing out of combat really should let you queue up shots to be executed simultaneously instead of forcing an unpause since you can do it with movement (etc.). Perks looks super unbalanced between them.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned much but I actually like are the environment graphics. I don't want to use a word like "pretty" or "beautiful", but it captures the atmosphere of an exotic impoverished Africa nicely with the clutter and texture work. As far as I can tell there's no cheap crap trying too hard filters doing any lifting, and there's a good amount of internal variety so far (a real danger of games with a strong focus on a setting like "Western" or "Mars" is everything looks very samey quickly). In a related thing, the use of African French accents for natives was probably not easy to implement (I doubt there's many actors who can pull it off in English), but it's such a nice boost to atmosphere. Contrast this with Arulco, where the local have little consistency in accent despite the game loving funny accents for mercs: You'd never guess Maddog, Dynamo, and Miguel are supposed to be from the same small country by hearing mercs speak. A few are vaguely Hispanic but at best it comes off as US/Canada who may know some Spanish than local of obscure South African country. Character graphics by contrast are... OK. Aside from how all the girls seem to have the same nose, they do their job and your characters can be distinguished at a glance. A lot of the generic Legion members having repeated models are super noticeable.
Minor issues with Proton that requires I alt tab twice to get the window recognized and properly aligned with the cursor, but I can't really fault the devs for that. Overall I'd actually look forward to a Jagged Alliance 4. The flaws are all fixable.
Overall a tentative
so far. On its own it's not an all time classic must play, but it's a worthy and respectful sequel, and that alone is rare enough in the current era.
