However, there’s no penalty for saving as often as you want, so you never really lose too much progress as long as you make liberal use of the quick save button. A single mistake can mean death for any of your characters, and all it takes is one view cone unaccounted for or one gunshot that was a tad too loud to bring a plan crashing down. The game is incredibly brutal, but I wouldn’t call it punishing. While it might seem unnecessary at first to make as many saves as the game tells you, you’ll quickly learn that you need to incorporate the save system into your strategies to succeed in Desperados III. In fact, if you go too long without saving your game, a giant save reminder will appear on screen with a timer counting the seconds since your last save. The game flat out tells you to make several frequent saves and to reload if anything goes wrong. In other strategy/tactics games, save-scumming is always an option, but it’s almost never the intended way to play. Experimentation is not just encouraged, but straight up required to successfully get through the game’s lengthy levels. Everything on the screen at any given time in Desperados III is important, and using the environment to your advantage is the key to victory.

The game is played from an isometric perspective, giving you an overhead view of your characters, the enemies, and environmental objects. You control a handful of characters, each with their own unique set of abilities, and are tasked with completing various objectives such as reaching certain areas or killing certain enemies. Desperados III is a real-time tactics game with a heavy emphasis on stealth. If you’ve played Shadow Tactics, then you know what to expect with Desperados III, but if you haven’t, then allow me to fill you in. Mimimi Games, the team behind 2015’s Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, helms this prequel to the classic cowboy series, and their influence on the game is immediately apparent from the first mission if you’re familiar with their work. It’s been a while since the last entry in the Desperados series, and this time, a new development team has climbed into the saddle. Because of its strange pairing of genre and setting, Desperados III offers a unique blend of strategy, characters, and story that cannot be found anywhere else in today’s gaming space. Desperados III aims to resurrect the classic tactics series, maintaining its focus on hardcore stealth while touching things up for the modern era, and it ultimately succeeds in doing so.

Not only is it one of the few noteworthy westerns of the gaming world, but it’s also one of the few real-time tactics games out there. Even less often do games try anything with westerns other than standard action games or shooters, which is why the Desperados series occupies such a unique space. The open frontier of the wild west lends itself perfectly to great gameplay, but games rarely capitalize on the freedom and possibilities that a western setting provides. The video game world needs more westerns.

Desperados iii review