Desperados III

PC, PS4, Xbox One

The series might have spent nearly 15 years dormant, but the timescales Desperados III itself operates on are much, much smaller. Think more like a single second. The meow of a trained cat covering the sound of three revolvers being emptied, as a vial cracks against the floorboards and leaks suffocating swamp gas, the magically linked fates of your last two would-be witnesses cut short by the fall of an axe – with careful preparation and timing, a room full of guards can be cleared out within one beautifully choreographed second. And the gap between elegantly executed success and failure? That’s often smaller still.

Like its turn-of-the-century predecessors (not just the ones it shares a name with, but also Commandos, which is at least as much of a reference point),

Desperados III blends top-down tactics with stealth. That means controlling a vastly outnumbered team of specialists, all at once, in real time. Every new second brings its own set of variables and decisions, as you try to hold in your head the relative positions of all your characters and patrol routes of a dozen guards, mentally modelling the swings of all their vision cones – you can only see one at a time – as you look for a way to take advantage of it all.

This might sound overwhelming – and it can be – but the game takes off the pressure a little by handing you two utterly essential tools. First, there’s Showdown Mode, which lets you freeze the action any time you like, queue up commands and unleash them with a single button press, making it possible to pull off the kind of perfectly honed moments of violence described above. But even with the help of Showdown, there’s still the matter of timing. A guard’s patrol doesn’t quite take them out of earshot of a throat being slit, or there’s a half-second gap between two takedowns you thought were synchronised – these are enough to doom you. Which is where the second, slightly less glamorous, tool comes in: our old friend quicksave.

If you go longer than 60 seconds without tapping F5, a flashing prompt will appear reminding you it’s time to save. At first, these seem excessive – after all, in most games, a minute of lost progress is something to be shrugged off – but that’s 60 sets of variables and opportunities that need to be run through again. In a probabilistic tactics game such as XCOM, where each hit is decided by dice roll and the skill lies in mitigating bad outcomes, constant reloading gets dismissed as ‘save scumming’. In a game as coldly deterministic as

Desperados III, it’s a necessity.

Each level is a string of tiny experiments that you run, observe, refine and try again. Nudging commands an inch to the left, advancing time frame by frame in Showdown Mode – this might give you an appreciation for the intricate clockwork you’re tangled in, how much each butterfly-wing tweak affects a plan’s outcome, but it can cause Desperados III’s demanding precision to tip over into outright frustration. It happens rarely, but if you do find yourself caught in a micromanagement loop, it’s often best to change approach completely. These aren’t puzzles with prescribed solutions, and the game offers so many ways to tackle them all.

Every new outlaw you recruit has their own unique arsenal. Doc McCoy brings a boobytrapped doctor’s bag, a sniper rifle, and a healthy disregard for the Hippocratic oath. Hector, with his bear trap and boomstick, doesn’t quite fit into a stealth game, like a too-large figure trying to squeeze through an antique doorframe. Even John Cooper, the cast’s vanilla Mario equivalent, has a few neat tricks up his suede sleeve: a knife that can be flung or applied more directly, a coin to distract guards, and dual pistols that can be queued up to fire simultaneously.

And then there are the women. It’s hard not to wince at the fact that the two female characters are a Black woman wielding voodoo magic and a white woman wielding ‘feminine wiles’ – irritatingly, this creates the two most interesting skillsets in the game. The latter, Kate O’Hara, is Agent 47 in a ballgown, able to move through most crowds safely and distract guards with a combination of flirtation and thrown vials of blinding perfume. Isabelle Moreau’s powers, meanwhile, are straight out of Dishonored: she can possess guards, send her pet cat to divert attention and, best of all, link two souls Domino-style. Both characters completely change the rhythm of Desperados III’s sneaking, so it’s no surprise that the game limits your access to both.

That goes for every member of your posse, actually: none of the 16 missions let you play with the full repertoire of powers. The story is continually finding excuses to split the party or disarm them, the best of which sees you waking up so catastrophically hungover that your louder and more lethal abilities are simply untenable. You start out with Hector – his beloved bear trap replaced with a rake which slams, Sideshow Bobstyle, into guards’ faces to stun them – then creep through the wrecked town, gathering your friends and piecing together the events of the night before.

This helps keep things fresh, forcing you to find new combinations of powers, but it also narrows the possibilities a little. Which is actually a good thing; faced with a blank canvas as huge as Desperados III’s maps, a limited palette is the kind of constraint that helps creativity bloom. And creativity really is the word here. You sculpt bespoke solutions to the ever-changing problem, chipping away at the possibilities, then get to sit back and admire your own handiwork. Watching a plan come together, guns and voodoo and bear traps working in perfect harmony, is incredibly satisfying. Even if it does only last a second.

Each level is a string of tiny experiments that you run, observe, refine and try again