izigame.me

I'm trying hard to like this game. I liked JA2 back in time. But that was a different time with different standards.
JA3 is not a bad game. It's just stuck in the 90s. And not in the good 90s, like it's supposed to be, but in the bad 90s.
I hired mercenaries to topple a dictatorship, and the sniper I hired brought a pistol and a (!) spare mag. This level of resources is acceptable, if I play a nuclear post apocalypse where my civilian character gets tossed into a fight for survival out of nowhere. When I hire a professional sniper, I don't want to count their pistol shots.
My enemies, members of a some gang, have automatic weapons and by the fire they lay down, no shortage of ammunition at all. It's only when I kill one, that their weapon, their body armor and their ammunition supply all magically vanish and are nowhere to be found. So after killing 5 thugs with auto-vanishing automatic weapons and body armor, my little gang trods on with their trusty pistols and in jeans, with me hoping I did not spend too many precious 9mm bullets to bankrupt myself.
This is supposed to go hard on 80s and 90s action movies... and yet, can you imagine Die Hard in this scenario? No way there would be a sentence like "And now I have a machine gun! Ho Ho Ho!". No, that dudes gun would have disappeared, John McLane would have been "what the hell just happened? The gun was here a second ago! This is witchcraft, I should get the f out of here".
If you like tactics games, think twice about this one. Make sure you are good with the Mario Cart way of handling realism. With vanishing items, your "professionals" having to count bullets when they invade a country, restarting a map because you missed so many shots that you know you cannot pay for the precious ammo later on...
Sorry... but I wish I could refund this. There is nothing wrong with the programming, the graphics are nice... maybe the story is nice, I didn't get far enough... but if I play a band invading a country I don't want to play a dude in jeans with a pistol and a fistful of ammo who cannot hit a barn door.
There is a level of "immersion" I need, and this is not it. It's not good graphics, or a perfect simulation I need, but it has to stand up to todays standards. This is an 90s game with all that was horrible about 90s games, no real improvements, but with good graphics.
If you like that, maybe it's for you. It isn't for me.
---
Update:
I have since tried more to like it... after all I don't want to just forget about my money I spent. The game randomly fobids to hire characters at game start. With no reasoning at all. Just imagine Baldurs Gate would say "sorry, you cannot plan an Elf this time" when you start a new game. Since it's character generation you would be like "WTH is happening", click "new game" again and suddenly Elf is playable... but humal paladin is not and Bards get -1 Strength. Why? Because random is fun. Right? Right?
So I started over 3 times to get roughly the crew I wanted to play with.
And then on the first island, 3 of my guys do a flanking move around an enemy, ending in nperfect pistol range, trying to hit it... and all miss. I really wished one of them could have just taken one step further and punched them in the face, how hard can it be to shoot someone with a pistol at 5m with no cover? Anyways, on the other side of the map, with my other three guys leapfrogging hard cover to get to the enemy sniper with their pistols, that sniper dude poked his head out of cover and with their first shot landed a critical headshot on one of my guys.
This is not "difficult" or "hard" or "punishing". There is nothing I could have done better. That is just stupid random. Making me randomly reload because the game is crappy isn't content or fun. It's 90s BS.
Again... whoever longs for all the bad "game design" decisions of the 90s, go ahead, you will get your fix.
If you like turn based tactics of the last 20 years, do yourself a favor, install literally any other game. If you miss randomness and stupidity, just turn off your monitor every other turn... does the same thing to the "difficulty level" and is way cheaper.