If you play modern video games, you sometimes feel as if they are deliberately set up to go smoothly for the player. Difficulty curves ramp up rather slowly, and the game goes out of its way to teach you game mechanics when you need them. If you watch two different people streaming the same game, you end up with nearly twice the same experience, because the game is somewhat on rails. Jagged Alliance 3 is the absolute opposite: It makes for great streaming content, because two people playing through the same mission will have very different experiences. However, the two people might have the same "oh shit" moment during that same mission, because it was set up that way.

The overall, and deliberate, result is that Jagged Alliance 3 is full of emergent narrative moments when something either went horribly wrong or succeeded against the odds. The game achieves that with two tricks: One are those scripted "oh shit" moments, like when the mission description told you about the 6 enemies present on the map, but not about the 12 reinforcements suddenly arriving. Or some enemy that has a crazy amount of health, running through your defensive fire right at you and slicing you up with a knife. The second trick is having lots of game mechanics that are likely to go spectacularly wrong: Friendly fire, grenade mishap chance, cars that look like great cover until they explode, in addition the genre-standard missing of shots with 90% hit chance (you need a mod to actually get that percentage chance shown). Even the gameplay on the strategic map is set up in a way that you can easily run out of essential resources, or get screwed over by an event.

Your mileage may vary on how you feel about those events. Sometimes the unexpected events are fun and interesting enough to hide the otherwise somewhat basic enemy AI. Sometimes something happens that feels totally unfair, as if you were playing against an opponent that is cheating. Jagged Alliance 3 is a game that sometimes sets you up to fail, in order to encourage you to start over, which gives you the opportunity to play with different mercenaries and different styles. If you are the kind of person that likes to carefully plan your tactical battles, the A-Team's "I love it when a plan comes together" kind of person, Jagged Alliance 3 can be a very frustrating game. If you are okay with rather playing the B- or C-Team, or if you are okay with lots of save-scumming, then Jagged Alliance 3 becomes a much better game.

Personally, I am on my third game, having failed the previous two. In one game I ran out of money, in the second I ran out of meds. I found the traps of the strategic gameplay more frustrating than the surprises in the missions, because missions are easier to restart; once you are in a situation of lacking resources in the strategic gameplay, you are probably already in a death spiral you can't recover from. With time you learn that for example the train mercs operation is a trap, because it takes too long and thus wastes too much money for what it does, while the train militia operation is very essential to success. The R&R operation, or just waiting if that isn't available, is also often your best option if everybody is wounded, because you just can't afford to use meds to treat wounds in that case.

Being more of a careful planner type of player in tactical games, I save the game a lot and restart missions when they went horribly wrong. Once you understood how a mission is set up, you can usually find a better approach. For example the same map might play very differently if you attack at night and use flare sticks / flare guns to expose the enemy, while staying in the dark. On other maps the massive use of explosives can be a way to overcome seemingly impossible odds. Sometimes the way to proceed is to do specific quests first. There is a lot of variety in Jagged Alliance 3. I learned that I can overcome the scripted cheating of the AI by me cheating through save-scumming. If you are okay with that approach, or aren't easily frustrated by things going terribly wrong, there is a lot of fun to be had in this game.