izigame.me

Desperados III has easily been one of my favourite games since it released, and I’ll say right now I highly recommend this game to anyone that loves the real time tactics genre and specifically the Commandos style of games, or any lover of good strategy. If you’ve never played a game like this before it may take some getting used to, but if you keep pushing and learning you’ll be rewarded with a fantastic game.
The story is simple, nothing groundbreaking, but serves its purpose providing the motivation/reasons for the actions you take in each mission and does enough to keep you interested in seeing how it all unfolds.
Each mission map is well designed, you will visit small and large towns, a train holdup, swamps, mines, mansions and more, plenty of variety and very fitting for a western themed game. The difficulty gradually ramps up with each mission, there’s plenty of “accident” kill opportunities and other creative ways to achieve primary and any secondary objectives, all maps having additional badges/challenges providing some replay value. These challenges range from things such as only using certain characters to complete the mission, speedruns, not using any cover, and several other ways to push you to find another way through the mission.
Each of the 5 characters is well thought out, Cooper is the allrounder with a knife and dual pistols, Hector as the big strong man of the crew, Doc the sniper, Kate using her charms to distract or lure enemies to their death, and Isabelle with some magical abilities. To be honest, Isabelle can be somewhat OP at times, but the game is still fun with her in it, and still challenging on higher difficulty levels.
The difficulty levels seem well done with beginner being the easiest, normal, hard, and desperado level being the hardest. Difficulty is ramped up by adding some additional enemies to the map, changing out simple cowboys for tougher NPC’s, or NPC’s that can’t be distracted.
Graphics and sound are excellent, they’ve really done justice to the wild west, from the dusty wind-swept desert, the bright lights and noise of the city, to the slushy swamps. You leave footprints as you move through the dry sand or wet mud, and noise as you slush about in the wet swamp that can alert your enemies to your presence, or used as a tool to lure them to their demise. If you decide to go loud and use your guns, you’ll see a visual radius indicator of the guns range and who will hear it, so deciding when its safe to get loud is relatively easy.
Alarms system is also good, rather than the entire map going on alert if you get spotted, as it did in Commandos, in this game there are separate sectors/zones where an alarm is triggered, so only that part of the map goes on alert, with additional enemies being deployed.
Controls, I never had any issues with the controls in this game, and if you dislike the default key binds you can always change them to whatever you prefer. Sometimes there can be small issues where a view cone is not 100% accurate, but in my experience, this occurs in all games in this genre, but I would stress this is a very minor issue and 99% of the time the view cones work perfectly. The showdown mode is also excellent, allowing you to easily plan out actions for each of your team members, at times I was taking down 8 enemy units with one showdown mode, and feels very rewarding.
Bugs, well there really isn’t much to say here, there are a few minor issues I’ve noticed, but on the whole Mimimi have put out some high-quality games with very few bugs, and Desperados III is no exception.
I think for me one of the big reasons I’ve loved all the games from Mimimi in this genre is the fact that they focused on something other than WW2, and the vast majority of games in this genre do focus on WW2. This fact only makes it all the more sad that Mimimi have stopped making games, at least for now, and there are very few developers that strived for the level of quality that Mimimi did, a developer I will very much miss.
There is also The Baron's Challenges, these add some additional replay value as it allows you to replay all the main story maps but change the characters you use, letting you experiment and find new ways to complete each mission. On to of that, there is a mission editor included, for details on how to use it check out the developers page on Steam, this basically allows you to position enemy units on each of the existing maps and create new challenges for yourself to then play through.
The Money for the Vultures DLC is also worth getting, it's only 3 missions but adds two new maps that are fun to play, and includes all of the existing characters and mechanics of the main story missions.
In summary, again, I would highly recommend this game to anyone. Great visuals, great sound, good controls, good story, a very enjoyable game.