Hardcore stealth games are kind of like puzzles, but with a lot more swearing. I’m a fan of the stealth genre, give me a Hitman of the 2000s, the recent Dues Ex: Mankind Divided, Dishonored, or Watch_Dogs 2, I’m happy with all of them. In fact, Mimimi Games’ last game Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun is a wonderfully rich isometric shogun-them-up. Desperados III is a story rich isometric game about rootin-tootin cowboy shooting, and I’ve found myself enjoying it quite a bit.

Strictly following the story of the usual suspects of the series, it is a prequel to a game that Windows 10 would spit back at you if you inserted the disk. A disk is an object that video games were placed on, this was so you could own the game, all without having to install a whole storefront you swear allegiance to in order to play your games. My, how the days of the wild west sure were funny. Joking aside, it does feel weird to be talking about a highly anticipated game that precedes something I’d only heard about in passing. I can profess knowledge and pass it off as all-knowing games journo’ nonsense all day.

However, when it comes to knowledge as to whether the gameplay has improved, I’m more out of luck than Yogi is getting the Pope out of his toilet. Which is to say, I have no idea how I would go about doing that. There are obvious improvements made in the genre since the previous game, as quite a few years have passed, both improving graphics and gameplay. Yet still, Desperados III feels like a game caught in yesteryear, for all the good and bad reasons. Most notably, this is true for the characters, though within an established series that’s 20-years in the making it would be hard to change established rules of the series.

Kate, the early leading woman of the group, feels like a reductive portrait of a woman even for the time period. Left as the passive character of the group, it is playing on this idea that somehow she can’t kill, all while “doctor” McCoy isn’t sticking to the Hippocratic oath anytime soon. Instead, you can use Kate to knock out an enemy and use the so-called doctor to kill. It is a tiny thing that should be inconsequential, but I keep coming back to it and wondering why she’s the passive one. Why not everyone or no one?

This leads nicely onto gameplay, which for working on a controller with 16 buttons, can feel overwhelming. Many hours in and after a day or two of a break, I’d have trouble feeling comfortable with each mapping. I think that is what makes Desperados III feel a little older. It is a game for PC ported to console in the desire to expand the number of possible players. This is not a bad thing by any means, but it makes it feel like one of those slow dad games you are playing to see what he likes and why.

For all this nitpicking on small things, I still find myself enjoying the stealthy killing on a beautiful spaghetti-western backdrop of romanticized revenge; all because we’re told the villain is villainous. The story itself lacks a sense of pace, as I’m the one having to slowly crawl through levels killing everyone I can find in the right order. Happening in what feels like two separate worlds, I both care to know more as the game goes on, but also couldn’t care for another line from what sounds like the same two actors playing all the roles. Though weary I may have gotten with the same lines in each level, I still wanted to get one step further in the story.

Despite all the nice cliched story with repeated in-game dialogue that left me embittered, there is something that broke my test of will every time. Quick saving and quick loading are the most important parts of the game, as Desperados III‘s idea of “hardcore” stealth is to make every sequence a list of killings you have to work out for yourself in order to solve the puzzle. In some respects that is fine, but after two hours of swearing, seeing only one cone of vision per enemy, and several million instances of “save scumming,” I get a bit fed up with the gameplay. I’m just in it for the popcorn cliched plot of revenge at that point.

I’m not against “save scumming” in some respects, that is how I got past your mum on the Commodore 64 port of The Wizard of Oz from 1985. Nonetheless, saving half a billion times to scrape my genitals across sandpaper with one rub every two seconds makes Desperados III a bit less fun. I still have no idea of how or why I like it. For all I know, it could just be the setting of rootin-tootin cowboy shooting that I enjoy. However, everything else lacks a sense of something to get excited about or worked up about. In truth, I don’t actually care that Kate is the passive character. Like everyone else she’s as two-dimensional as a pop-up book of blank pages. She’s cliche and stereotypical, just like everyone else, including the Black woman being a witch.

In conclusion, Desperados III is a fine puzzle game with a mind-numbing story that is cliched enough to be a third Bad Boys film. As a stealth game, it features enemies with cones bigger than the one you mum keeps talking about when the Ice Cream van comes around. Is it fun? Not really, but is it challenging? Yes, and sometimes that is enough for psychos such as myself to smash their head against a wall. Though being told to time travel every few minutes lessens the experience greatly, as levels are huge and mishaps turn into cataclysms.

An Xbox One review copy of Desperados III was provided by THQ Nordic for this review.

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Desperados III

$59.99 USD

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• Challenging gameplay.
• Fun cliched western setting.

Cons

• Constant quick saving required.
• A lack of depth of character or subversion.

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