Our protagonists are John Cooper, a bounty hunter armed with a knife, two pistols, and an infinite supply of fake coins to throw Doc McCoy, a mercenary physician with an interesting interpretation of the Hippocratic oath and a long-range pistol Kate O’Hara, a rancher who can distract male guards and lure them away for a stealthy takedown Hector Mendoza, a massive trapper with an axe and a fuck-off-big bear trap named “Bianca” and Isabelle Moreau, a voodoo practitioner with a wicked set of occult powers. Your gang includes five characters, some of whom return from the original series. Saving and reloading is encouraged in fact, you can set a reminder to appear if you haven’t saved recently. Desperados III is very good at walking the line between frustrating and rewarding, presenting you with many different paths and obstacles, and just as many ways to surmount them. You can go in stealthily or guns blazing, or look for opportunities to create “accidents”, such as pushing boulders onto people. Each level is made up of a series of inter-connected puzzles, each of which has multiple solutions, depending on how you want to tackle them. The campaign takes you through mountains, frontier towns, swamps, the sumptuous city of New Orleans, and beyond. The first time I held down ALT and freely rotated the camera was kind of mind-blowing. Levels are intricately detailed, and animations are smooth and expressive. Desperados III looks and plays beautifully. Having grown up on a steady diet of Commandos, playing this felt like coming home, only better because home got upgraded with all the mod cons. Desperados III functions as a prequel to the original series so it’s perfect for those who missed out (or weren’t born yet) when the first game was released back in 2001. The one bright spot recently has been Mimimi Games’ previous entry into the genre – Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun – and having proven themselves worthy with that title, the studio was given the license to the venerable Desperados series. Fans of real-time tactical strategy have been in a bit of a lurch for over a decade now.
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