REVIEW : Desperados III (XBOX one)
While the Westward genre may be synonymous with lighting-fast duels and run-and-gun shootouts, Desperados 3’s real-time tactical stealth missions are best performed at a meticulous crawl. Slow and steady is the order of the day in this often the severely challenging game of covert cowboys, so it’s just as well that Desperados 3 gives you a bright gang of outlaws with different and complementary skills, ever-changing mission parameters that support experimentation, and a distinct collection of sand-swept settings to sneak through. Desperados 3 is a Western that’s just as cunning as it is wild, and should be persistently in the iron sights of anyone with the desire for a serious stealth challenge.
It’s entirely probable you’re not familiar with the Desperados series, considering the last part of the previously PC-only franchise – Desperados 2: Cooper’s Revenge – was released 14 years ago. It matters not, though, since Desperados 3 is a prequel to the first game and thus any prior experience of its plot or characters isn’t required for newcomers looking to saddle up. Desperados 3’s campaign works as an origin story for main protagonist John Cooper, who stars in yet another tale of bitter revenge that spills its first blood on the rocks of Colorado and drops a trail down to the dirtiest depths of New Mexico. It’s a rough tour through a series of vibrant and wonderfully detailed frontier settings.
The plot may be more stock-standard than an unmodified Winchester, but what makes the 30-hour journey of Desperados 3’s campaign so captivating is the camaraderie shared between its five playable characters. Their contextual banter as you make your way through each murderous mission helps to define their personalities, making for an outlaw gang. An early mission sees two characters make a bet to see who can claim the most scalps, and then with each subsequent kill, you can hear them call out their running tallies like Gimli and Legolas in Lord of the Rings, which is just one of numerous nice little touches. Although it admittedly seems a little odd when these back-and-forths continue even when the characters are separated by large stretches of the map, almost as though they’ve been outfitted with walkie talkies by a time-travelling Doc Brown.
The Magnificent Five
Each member of your bloodthirsty brigade has their specific skills and tools, and much of Desperados 3 is spent hiding in bushes for several minutes at a time trying to decide exactly which combination of them is required to systematically snuff out each area full of enemies. Cooper can toss coins to startle horses into kicking guards unconscious, Doc McCoy’s rifle can snipe enemies from afar, Hector’s shotgun blast can take out closely gathered troops all at once, and Kate can don a seductive disguise to divert an enemy’s gaze. These individual skills are typically best used in tandem, such as using Hector to lay down a bear trap behind some bushes and then getting the coquettish Kate to lure them into its gaping maw.
Each figure is consistently helpful but by far the most relevant slayer in Desperados 3 is Isabelle. This voodoo priestess provides a supernatural spin on the otherwise fairly traditional stealth mechanics, largely using her ability to fire a blow dart into two enemies to link them together as a pair of walking voodoo dolls, whereby whatever fate befalls one is simultaneously inflicted upon the other. Tethering baddies together in this way leads to some truly inspired solutions for thinning out the enemy numbers. It’s a slight shame she doesn’t join Cooper’s crew until roughly midway through the campaign, but when she does she reinvigorates the possibilities from then on out.
Desperados 3’s automated assaults don’t make life too easy, though, because pulling off such graceful cowboy-killing choreography still requires a lot of rehearsals. Since every guard is dutifully watching another guard’s back, you’ll almost always be caught in the act if you simply sneak up to stab a lookout from behind. That leads to a heck of a lot of trial and error should you wish to make your way through each mission without alerting the guards and having them call in reinforcements. Despite being a game about cowboys, Desperados 3 is not so much about being quick on the draw as it is about being quick on the quicksave, and it’s self-aware of its reliance on this system to the point that an obnoxious quicksave reminder prompt appears in the middle of the screen should you forget to register your progress for longer than a minute. (Thankfully, this can be disabled.)
Many missions also introduce strategy-altering twists to keep things fresh, such as the map that’s bisected by regular trains that forces you to time your kills on one side of the track when the sentries on the other side have their vision obscured by the passing train carriages.
But like a transcontinental train trip, Desperados 3’s story missions themselves are something of a long haul. Each of the final two of the 16 missions on offer took me well over three hours to complete; the last time
