Desperados III

TDLR: Probably one of the very best in the niche "tactical stealth" genre. In this iteration of the genre you play a group of western movie archetypes, Cooper the Gunslinger, Doc the Black Hat Assassin, Kate the Femme Fatale, and some others. The game has a strong narrative, but the story is quite short, and the game is really focused on replaying the missions to get a higher score / better time. Tactical Stealth games are a bit of a rarity, and honestly, not really my thing. Mimimi Games made three that all received critical acclaim. Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, set in feudal Japan. Desperados III, set in the Wild West and Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, set in a "Pirates of the Caribbean" fantasy world. They then sadly closed down in 2023. All three games have a top-down isometric perspective, and play in real-time, with the player being able to pause, slow or speed up time. Each mission begins with your team arriving on a large complex map, filled with enemies, and often neutral NPCs as well. Vision Cones can be made visible for enemies, and your team travels the map, eliminating or avoiding enemies, to reach a specific goal. Each member of the team has differing talents, Cooper is a crack pistol shot, and can throw a knife, Kate can wear disguises and walk past most guards, The Doc has a long range pistol and so forth. You can pause the game, issue instructions to each team member, and unpause to let your plan play out. Quick-Saving and Reloading is encouraged, as trial and error is very much expected. The characters are all well-voiced and likeable, and the story is a very standard western revenge movie, that sees the team raiding a mine, stopping a wedding, and defending a homestead and other classic western battles. The campaign has around 16 missions, which each took me over an hour to play, but I'm not great at the game, so it can probably be finished much quicker. The focus of the game, and I assume the whole genre is to replay each mission to get higher scores and better times, which I had no interest in at all, I found the game "fun", but once I had solved a map I wasn't desperate to replay it over and over. Still the fact that I don't like genre, but still recommend it should tell you something. Stealth and patience are really key, and I'm not really good at either. Desperados is highly rated by critics and deserves it's position as possibly the best game of it's type. Even if you're unfamiliar with this type of game, it's still worth playing, just to experience the best that the genre offers.

A perfect tactical stealth puzzle game. There isn't anything better on the market, so it's an easy recommendation.

Very good tactical game. It's taken me a while to come back and try to go beyond the initial missions, but doing so has made me realize how good a game it is, and the regret of taking so long to fully realize this. Think Commandos Origins but with a Wild West setting, and you get the idea of how this game works and plays. Worth the money to get it.