Playing Jagged Alliance Crossfire now.
Completing Back In Action(BIA) on hard ironman did not prepare me for Crossfire and after failing a few times on hard at the start I decided to play on normal ironman.
Back in Action starts you facing against machete and pistol wielding clowns, Crossfire enemies in the beginning carry short-range automatics in entrenched position. You also start with less money, enough to get 2 mercs. On hard you have $ to pick 1 AIM merc and are left with enough money to recruit 1 MERC mercenary, weaklings like Flo and Bubba. But they do give you a vest, an automatic pistol and a grenade launcher at the start. On normal I choose Spider and Steroid, a medic and mechanic which turned out to be the a good choice.
BIA lets me pick up a rifle early which leads to me shooting shorter range enemies from afar. Crossfire has me sneaking around picking off evil peoples one by one, which is difficult as Spider and Steroid have poor stealth who can be heard crouch walking and crawling around behind the enemies backs. I find myself watching the patrol routines of enemies so I can pick them off away from the others, something I didn't bother to do in many games. At one point I had my mercs crawl across a bridge hidden from view behind the wall railings to get close to two enemies, pop up and opened up with submachinegun on two guards.
I should be able to play it on hard now. I play strategy/tactical games on ironman and this is better than the realtime squad games like Fallout Tactics, 7.62 and UFO series. The maps in Crossfire so far are decent, with bridges, a hydroelectric dam and a nice temple on a mountain. But it is a pretty short game, map is about half the size of Alruco. Maybe I'll do an LP on hard ironman one day.
The rebalancing mod is also out for Crossfire. You can also easily mod this yourself, some of files are in txt.
A pity JABIA was released before it was ready, without line-of-sight, map inventory and a host of other problems, as well as a demo that hurt more than it helped.
The final version is more complete, better than Silent Storm and definitely 7.62. If you life realtime games I suggest you try this out, I picked it up on sale. But then my expectations weren't that high due to the bashing in this thread.
Didn't try the demo, probably won't like it if I tried, I also didn't get into the game for awhile until I decided to play ironman and met level 3 opposition, who are proper soldiers and not hillbillies with machetes. The problem with ironman is that mercs cannot be instantly killed, they go unconscious and if you heal them in time they get back up. But then I lost half my squad in a couple of moments but with a smoke grenade covering them, managed to save everybody. I had to retreat from the map to heal and replace armour though.
Also, the sounds of RPK firing <3. Too bad it has only a 45 round magazine.
BIA and Crossfire is a lot less fun without ironman, but that goes for many games.