homeDesperados III
Desperados 3 is a fun little stealth strategy game and a modern sequel (actually, a prequel if you even care about the story) to a genre pioneer. While I enjoyed it overall, it left me a little disappointed at times. I am someone who really enjoys stealth games. They're all a series of very satisfying, open-ended puzzles to solve, but coming to this game from something like Hitman WOA left me underwhelmed in terms of player freedom. This game is not very open-ended, even if it tries to appear as if it is, which does detract from it a LOT as a stealth game, but it still scratches an itch for tactical planning and puzzle solving, even if the tactics aren't super deep. Unfortunately, not every level has an abundance of solutions, and some of them even feel as though there's only one real solution, which, for the most part just boils down to killing enemies in the right order, but it's still pretty fun to find what little solutions there are. For this reason, replay value is pretty low, but it's not a bad game at all. I had a lot of fun in the ~20 hours it took me to complete the story mode, and there are additional challenges if you're up for them. It's not completely on the rails or anything, but it's not very sandboxy either, at least not to the extent that Hitman WOA is, which is probably my favourite stealth game of all time and the gold standard for sandbox stealth, with Blood Money, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Thief Gold trailing behind as my other favourites. It's not a very tough game either. Yes, it's easy to mess up, but the game encourages you to quicksave and experiment a lot, and if you play like that, you really won't have a difficult time. It's a very forgiving game of trial and error. If you decide to impose restraints on yourself and decide to go against the developer endorsed save-scumming system, then it'll be a completely different and very rage inducing game. The story is a pretty generic wild west revenge story, nothing special about it, but the characters and their abilities are a lot of fun to play with. The levels are very pretty too. Each one is a neatly crafted diorama of typical wild west locations, and there are opportunities for fun things like environmental kills all over the levels, but again, it's just not as open-ended as I'd want from a stealth game, but it's perfectly fine as a puzzle game. Get it on sale. |