I was raised up loving guns and wanting to be in the military, but to make a long story short a knee injury stopped my dreams. Then comes this game which now makes me yearn for the mercenary life. I heard about JA2 for years and never got to it even though I was an XCom fan, even bought it on Steam on sale one day for cheap and never got to it, it was simply backlogged. I got this on the recent Holiday sale cheap enough and decided enough was enough, I got 2 digital copies of JA2 and it's expansion and I might as well try it out. Heck the GOG version was DRM free, nothing to lose but a little spare time. Now over the past week I repeatedly smacked myself for not hopping on this game long ago.
The game is great as-is and is a very good, fun, long campaign. You can play the campaign a few times through with various tactics like 'tons of cheap mercs with pistols' or 'a few high-end mercs with uber gear' and all the variations in between. You can start with Drassen, or ignore the airport and go straight for the hospital, all kinds of options are available from a strategists point of view. Add on combat that seems to play out in a fun yet not overly unrealistic fashion and you got a mix that's a winner.
I will also note that the 1.13 mod adds a new level to kit. You now have only a few pants pockets on mercs and their hands to hold things, and you must equip holsters, riggins, and backpacks of various kinds and sizes to store extra kit. Plus it adds hundreds of new guns, remote detonators for bombs, mines, grenades, dozens of sets of armor, and much much more. It's also much harder and I would say play vanilla JA2 at least a week before delving into 1.13 because once you try it there is no going back.
Overall only thing killing the 5 star rating is the fact that even with the newest patch JA2 still has a few prevalent bugs and annoyances, and the community patch fixes some of the problems but adds a few new ones on top of the ones left over. So minor bugs aside perfect game.