Desperados 3 is a strategy and real-time tactical-based game developed by Mimimi Productions. The game was published by THQ Nordic and released on the 16th of June 2020. The title was released on multiple platforms like PS4, PC, and Xbox One.
Desperados 3 doesn’t have many competitors to the genre it follows. It has the title for being one of the best tactical stealth game on PS4 with a cowboy feel to it. This doesn’t imply that the game developer is to take all the credits. The reason for this is that it isn’t the very perfect implementation of its specific genre. It is indeed a well set up strategy game that can be referred easily to this genre lovers. Along with amazing and tough gameplay, due to some strict rulings of this game, it would be a difficult one for those entering recently in this game niche.
The game starts with a flashback as a mission. You are a child and follow your father to a bunch of villains. You sneak through the bushes and learn how to distract those guards by throwing pebbles. Your father teaches you the tactics at the start. Suddenly, the situation worsens, and your father must leave you to see some errands of his own. He will return afterward, as he says. Before he leaves, you ask for a gun. Your father refuses to provide you one as it is a huge responsibility. He does challenge you to hit a tree, 10 paces far, with a knife and provides you one. If you succeed in doing so, you would be handed with a gun. Your father rushes away, and that’s how your character, young John Cooper comes into place. He is left in enemy territory, trying his best to hit that knife to the tree continuously.
The game then fast-forwards to the present moment where a train is being stopped and is going to get robbed. An unfortunate thief opens a train cabin from the back and sees you, now the adult John Cooper. You are still in possession of that knife your father gave you, called Bullseye, a very fine knife. You had turned from a weak inexperienced boy who had issues hitting knife to a tree, to an experienced gunslinger. This is from where you get to know the back-end story and proceed further to take revenge from the enemies.
Desperados 3’s development of Mimimi Games, who previously had also released Shadow Tactics: Blades Of The Shogun which was also a very outstanding piece of a real-time tactical stealth game, is a lot like their previous one. You can also relate it to the Commandos series which was a good one too. Missions for the game starts with putting you in a location. The map is intensely beautiful with exceptional detail poured into it as you will see very little detailing too if looked closely. You will find multiple routes for you to complete the challenge. Some of it may disappear when you turn from a beautifully drawn environments turn into 3D models, whereas Mimimi Games has tried to cover this a lot. Elaborated designing of each level makes you delve into the game to find what’s more in it.
Stealth games have a major necessity, and it is information. This game’s sleek user interface does provide you that as it is extremely easy to read and explore throughout your location. You can see the scope of sight for any enemy guard on clicking on them once. You will see green highlights to show that. Guards also have some variety to them. Some would be patrolling on definite paths, while others would be easing themselves, lying under the sun, and waiting for you to come out of any bush. They make some form of cohesion as sneaking from one of those would alert the other ones. As you proceed, the game is going to get tough and can be extremely difficult for some. Picking of choices, paths, and targets is necessary because it would create a problem if dealt irresponsibly. You need to be as sneaky as you can, moving around sightlines and finding spaces in between guard patrols to get out of their clusters. One thing I liked is of close combat as you can kill some guards by getting very close to them and hit them with a knife blow. You also need to be careful enough to hide or dispose of bodies of guards killed by it, so that someone doesn’t find out and creates a mess.
This can be complicated for you considering that you will be controlling a group of 5 people as you are a team of five. Our classic John Cooper is accompanied by several characters from which some are from the previous Desperados games. John is also one of them. Change of even one character from your team manipulates the way you approach your enemies. Your very first team member will be Doc McCoy. He is an amazing sniper and a bounty-hunting physician too. He bonds well with John Cooper. They take out enemies in a very effective way as they are a perfect match like ‘made for each other’.
You also have a pro mode named Showdown Mode. If you had played Max Payne before, you can easily remember what I would be talking about. In this mode, time halts and you plan your strategy for the move to implement when the time resumes. This provides you to hit with a nice and precise blow. It is most useful when hitting multiple targets as you can quickly assign these tasks to your different characters using their unique set of attacks. Doc McCoy can also move guards away from those paths where you intend to go by throwing his physician bag, which when looked to detonates a huge cloud of smoke that has chloroform-soaked rags in it and make the guards sleep while you can swiftly move from that area undamaged.
If you are more of a sneaky guy and are good at fooling guards by making distractions, Kate O’Hara will fit you well. Kate is an interesting character. She uses the best of her abilities for being a female. She can change her clothes and can roam freely among the guards as identical to them without getting noticed. She even does flirt with them momentarily so that they lose their long vision and our team can pass safely from a spot. Even aggressive, she also seduces some into following her. This gives an idea that how well thought, and variance does this game contain in terms of content.
Kate is indeed capable, but her capabilities are in the style of scented clouds of perfume and a small and pretty Derringer gun. Desperados isn’t implementing the Spaghetti Western trademark but making it a cowboy type cartoon which also doesn’t like to speak about the new things. The story isn’t punchy at all: all about revenge and the characters seem as if they are taken from a very old and classic magazine like our gunslinger and bounty hunter. We also have a character with a dark feel to her, a witch named Isabelle. Her power is that she can control the minds of people, even making them fight their allies. I really like the fact that they represent the oldness in them. I am a classic lover, you can say!
Some fans will say that the game developers should have thought out of the box and modernize these old age stereotypes. This game’s men are violent and heroic whereas women are cunning and canny. I think that the developers should have given more time to rework the characters as they released the game after many years, so they had an abundance of time. The characters from the old titles in the series are identical whereas the new ones should have been considered attentively too.
These types of games aren’t only stealth independent. Things go wrong a lot when they do in Desperados 3. In an instant, the enemy guards would find a body or someone who you thought couldn’t see well, will see you. As the alarm would buzz off, you would see enemy groups with guns surrounding you. You will have some ways to hide and watch things cool down, but John Cooper has an eight-shot revolver and doesn’t hesitate to use it. As for the easy settings of difficulty, you may expect to be heroic of your squad and fight for revenge, but an increase in difficulty would make you think for sure.
To keep things hard for us, every attack has a cooldown gap to it making it difficult to use Showdown Mode and remove reinforcements from the face of Earth. You will also be bound on ammo due to its limitedness. Once, our hero Cooper has used his 16 bullets or Doc has used his all rifle bullets, you will only have knives and syringes left then. You may find ammunition boxes, but it’s a rare case to find one and they aren’t of that much use after all.
I forgot to mention another badass character our squad has, and his name is Hector. He is a nasty outdoorsman having a fatal axe, and interestingly, a big bear trap. He whistles to the guards gaining their attention and then fools them into that bear trap. He is an overpowered character as he also has twice health points than the other characters and contains a flask filled with tequila that heals him. He is also in the hold of a shotgun with a double barrel that vaporizes anyone coming in a certain range. OP? Right!
Desperados 3 is made such that it feels hard to play. It isn’t a piece of cake. You would love to experiment with different techniques, strategies, and applying different operators. Each change would lead to a change in your gameplay style. Some difficulty levels would require you to redo them as they won’t get completed in one turn. Popular levels like the town of Flagstone or New Orleans have them divided into 2 zones, public and private. In some locations, some enemies can be taken down by different options the game would provide. For example, you can either lose the rope of the church bell to hit the guard’s head, making a bull angry by tossing a coin or spiking a barrel of whiskey with laudanum. You can also use environmental threats to your use, such as rolling big boulders over big groups of enemies and killing them.
There are a lot of aspects in the Desperados 3 that need to be given some seriousness to. That’s the beauty of strategy that there isn’t one way to do things. You can be creative and exploring. You can use different characters to your advantage. After playing it, you would start getting the hold of your favorite operators and the game sense you have, this helps a lot in choosing characters for each kind of situation. Due to such a result diversity, it may seem that you haven’t played a small part in the game. If you are impatient one, you are going to fed up and scratch your head hard on difficult levels, otherwise, it would be fun to play.