I have always had a fondness for real time strategy games, especially when they involve both stealth and open-ended missions, where you have control over how the objectives are played out. Part of this fondness comes from a place of nostalgia, since Commandos and Desperados were some of the first games I ever played on a PC, so you can imagine my excitement at getting another Desperados, and from the developers of the excellent Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun to boot.
When Desperados first came out by developers Spellbound, it was known for its innovative approach to the strategy genre, combining a cinematic storytelling presentation with real time tactics. It allowed for a game that was both entertaining to watch and satisfying to play. Fast forward almost two decades, and we have the third entry, where it is left to see just how much of its essence it has kept today.
The game doesn’t waste time in letting you know how unique each character is and why the experience won’t be a walk in the park with enemies tightly guarding each other’s patrol routes and keeping a vigilant eye over the wild west battlefield. To even those odds, you truly have to rely on each character’s strength, and think of them as a whole in your strategies.
Each character has a unique set of abilities that speak to their strengths. For example, Cooper carries around fake coins that he can throw to distract enemies, and can shoot 2 of his guns at the same time, McCoy can throw a poisonous trap bag to lure enemies, whilst Kate can Flirt to draw someone’s attention or change into certain disguises, etc…
On top of a variety of these tools, the game mostly sets you in an open-ended world where you have various means of completing the same task. It starts strong, with one of the highlights being the introductory open-world mission where you must take out multiple targets in any order you pick. You can either take them out conventionally or make their deaths look like an accident.
However, as mentioned before, the game is no walk in the park as the enemies are highly vigilant on normal+ difficulties, and scattered everywhere, meaning that you can’t just wait to pick off enemies one by one, as there is a high chance someone is going to notice you. This is where the combination of the clever tools with the pause/queue mechanic comes in.
Anytime in game, players can pause the flow by pressing the shift key, which time-freezes the world around the player, allowing them to not only take a breather, but carefully inspect their environments and enemies. During this mode, each character can queue up to one tool or ability to use, which must be triggered by pressing enter, whether through the pause view or via real-time. The mixture of this with the unique skills, allows you to simultaneously set some clever strategies in motion that can help you overcome challenging situations at the press of a button.
This type of mechanic synchronicity is at the core of the experience, where the most fun is had once you learn to use different characters at once to overcome situations in unique ways. What really helps here is that the game has a good knowledge pacing and uses its story beats to partner up different combinations of characters from the beginning few chapters. What this does is, it allows you to get used to different character combinations and what strategies are possible, making the learning curve more natural.
On top of it all, the game highly encourages the use of the quick save button, as trial and error is a part and parcel of this experience, evident from the cinematic launch trailer. If you have read some of my previous reviews on games that have a quick save function, you know that I am a huge fan of this feature which I wish all games would use, as it lets you take greater risks without having to worry about restarting at a checkpoint that might have happened 10-15 minutes ago (which is a long time in a game such as this).This in turn also saves you time, and for someone like me who doesn’t have too much free-time, lets me pick up and play right from where I left off.
Another Quality of Life feature present here is the classic speed up button, which lets you speed up the game’s pace, saving you of having to wait for long periods of times for an enemy to go where you intend them to.
The only downside I saw to the quick-save feature, is that even with encouragement to use it (it literally flashes the “time since last saved” button on screen after not saving for a while), the game still considers it a crutch during the ratings screen, showing you how many times you have saved. Whilst this isn’t a huge issue, it does seem to contradict their encouragement from a design point of view as players will associate a higher number with a less optimal playthrough, so it might have been better to just remove that stat and its reliance on any ratings.
Challenges are present here as well, with certain missions requiring you to do certain things in order to gain better completion rates. However, they could have been better handled since difficulty level is used as a metric as well, which I feel goes against the player choice of having a tailored experience. It would have been better to just ask for players to partake on risky objectives, which could be inherently challenging, rather than just outright telling someone to complete a level on the hardest difficulty.
As you can imagine, whilst the game might be hard, managing to pull off a perfect blend of actions is really satisfying, making you really feel like a badass cowboy. It helps that the game has a very interesting mission recap scene that draws a plot on the map showing what characters you used and how. Its useful data that shows you what characters and abilities you rely on the most, and what might have caused you to have a hard time at certain points in game.
Story wise, Desperados III is a prequel to the events of the first game, where we get to see how our iconic Gunslinging hero Cooper met with the rest of the gang, including the chameleon Kate and the not so “good doctor” McCoy. When I first heard that the game would be a prequel, I was worried that the character introductions would not be as iconic.
Thankfully, I was wrong as it is a joy to see certain characters meet for the first time and go through a learning process of each other’s personality. Cleverly, the developers have mixed some of this development into actual gameplay. For example, the first time you use Cooper’s coin throw ability in front of Kate, she mentions how wasteful it seems, only to be told by Cooper that they are fakes. It is an added polish that makes the combinations really entertaining, whilst making each character’s unique personality and life experience stand out. Just wait till you hear McCoy ask hector about his gigantic trap Bianca!
The music is memorable and devilishly western, really highlighting and boosting key story beats, bringing in both emotion and excitement. The story isn’t as ground-breaking as something you’d expect from a western such as Red Dead Redemption but still manages to hold its own, highlighting all that we love about the genre, and how good it mixes with themes of revenge.
The game looks and runs gorgeously as well, requiring a modest GTX 500 series card as minimum. The variety of environments in this game not only makes it look good, but also prevents it from being a bit too repetitive. I played the game on a GTX 980ti and ran the game without a hitch. With the actual power utilised, I could see that even my card was a bit of an overkill, unless playing in 2K+ resolutions.
Overall, Desperados III is a solid game, which has got a bit of everything for everyone, from an entertaining story with charming characters, different ways to complete missions and clever real time strategy gameplay, it is bound to be enjoyed by strategy and non-strategy gamers alike. Seriously, if games like Hitman or Immersive Sims is your thing, or you just like a good western, you have to give this a go! I had to restrain myself from sharing all the cool abilities and features present, as there is a lot more to the game than I have mentioned, and the fun is in finding it out for yourself!
Whilst the difficulty might not be as approachable at times, I doubt anyone could have done a better job than what MiMiMi games did at not only bringing this franchise back to its root, but also making it stand out amongst a lot of copy paste real time strategy games these days, truly showing that Desperados III has the most badass gunslingers in the west and is still lots of fun to play. Not to mention with the scale of levels and the variety of objectives, it is a packed game, well worth the asking price.