Having had this game for just a few days it is one of the hardest turn based combat games I have ever played. Yes the dialogue is funky and the fact that the top two guys are now Euro based "boring background" badass dudes is overstated. I like the fact that guns now pack a bigger punch on BOTH SIDES of the game.
However I don't care for the fact that the bad guys know exactly where you are at all times. I spread my team out on several occasions without firing a shot only to have no less than 3 bad guys show up in a circle around my team members and summarily execute them. Also don't trust the pre-combat counter that shows how many bad guys are in an area. I just sent a 6 person team into an area that said 11...in JA2 and JA2UB this was possible...anyway before my last Merc got blown away my team had stacked 32 bodies up in front of them with at least 5 more coming in for the kill while my character bled to death.
Now what I do like is the increased team size making you able to have up to 10 Mercs in a squad, new and revised weapons and sounds and revamped maps. All of these things improve upon the fact that JA2 was a great game and this one is even better. Nice work overall.
As a side note Cheat codes will activate but will not work with this game installed on Windows7 Ultimate 64bit. That is the only thing that I can think of which might be causing a problem and my install is running in Compatibility mode for WinXP and one of the SP's.