Desperados 3 Review — Test — Terrific Wild-west Stealth Strategy Festival | by ZapZockt
terrific wild west stealth strategy festival
Desperados 3 Review — a sneak tactics real-time strategy game in a wild west setting.
In this article, I’ll show you everything about Desperados 3, the new real-time strategy game with wild-west film feeling, lots of fancy characters, and wacky missions. Desperados 3 is released for Playstation PS4, Xbox One, and PC (Steam). In this Desperados 3 Review, you get all information, a complete analysis of the game, and my rating for the new sneak Strategy game Hit by Mimimi and THQ Nordic.
This article is available here as text, but also as a YouTube video ( German voice-over, many subtitles). This way you can choose how you would like to enjoy it most.
Video:
German voice-over, many subtitles
Desperados 3 Test — Review — Intro
Hi there, it’s the Zap. In this article I’ll introduce you to the game Desperados 3, it’s all about tough cowboys and crisp sneak strategy. And there is the question whether a good game comes out of it if you combine both cleverly?
So here you get all the details about the game and in the end, there is also a rating from me, but most of all I want to give you all the information to decide for yourself if it could be something for you.
I have received a free test sample from the publisher. But all games are always tested by me and with the thought in my head how I would feel if I had paid the full price.
Desperados Serie — Background
Desperados 3 is developed by the German studio MiMiMi Productions from Munich and published by THQ Nordic. MiMiMi was recently very successful in the strategy area with Shadow Tactics and the Desperados series was quite a popular brand. So the expectations for Desperados 3 have been quite high from the beginning. But first trailers and a demo version already showed the positive trend of where the new cowboy sneak tactics game will go.
Desperados is a series that is roughly based on the classic Commandos. You control individual heroes, all of whom have special abilities, through a strategic map, dodging enemy cones of sight as best as you can and using the very different strengths of the characters to clear a map of enemies one by one.
The first part of the series was called “Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive” and was already released in 2001, followed by a sequel with “Desperados 2: Cooper’s Revenge”. Both games were moderately successful at that time, Metacritic scores of 78% and 66% indicate a success, which however could not quite keep up with Commando’s original success.
The games were then developed by Spellbound Entertainment. Unfortunately, the studio stumbled after the death of the founder in 2009, so that the company had to go into liquidation in 2012. Parts of the studio were transferred to the new company Black Forest Games, which today is again very successful in producing games, currently for example Destroy all Humans!
The trademark rights to the Desperados brand then apparently passed to THQ Nordic over time. With MiMiMi Games, they have now hired a new, tactic-game experienced developer to revive the Desperados brand.
Desperados 3 — Game Type
Desperados is a sneak tactics real-time strategy game. Such games are typically organized in separate maps, which in the case of Desperados 3 can be quite large. We control multiple characters, more to come about these in a moment. All enemies have fixed patrol routes, but if an alarm is triggered, they can react very unexpectedly and request reinforcements.
That’s why we should ideally avoid this case and sneak through the enemy’s cones of sight, distract them with special tricks of the heroes, or at least attack from the ambush in such a way that no alarm is triggered if possible. An alarm does not immediately mean the end of the mission, but the extra guards do not make the game any easier to play. A more direct approach will therefore usually be much more dangerous and difficult than analyzing the situation in detail and skilfully looking for gaps in patrol routes and visibility and then exploiting them.
Most things happen in real-time and require very good timing. But we also have the possibility to switch to a kind of stop-and-go mode at any time. Then the game pauses, and we can give instructions to all the figures, which they then execute in parallel. In some cases, instructions can be chained together or the actions of several characters in different places can be precisely coordinated. This results in something like a kind of mini-script. Once we have given instructions in this mode, we can then let the time run again and wait for the most opportune moment, and then activate “Execute” so that our heroes put the decisions they made before into action.
Gameplay — Characters and Skills
We play in Desperados as the bounty hunter John Cooper, already known from the predecessors. He was accustomed to weapons and the infiltration of enemy bases by his father from an early age and was trained for it, as you can experience for yourself in the first tutorial mission in Desperados 3. No wonder, then, that even as a seasoned gunfighter he continues to pursue this trade.
John Cooper is very unerring with his two colts, but his outstanding skill is the skillful handling of the knife. Not only can he secretly take out enemies from behind, but he can also eliminate them silently and accurately at long range.
Throughout the story, he meets four other companions who help him in his search for the villain Frank, who is apparently in the service of an unscrupulous railway company. Together with these four very special and diversified allies, we take up the fight against the big company that is terrorizing the environment.
Each character offers not only its own exciting story but also its own skills, which allow completely different approaches. And each of the five characters joins the Cooper gang for different reasons.
First, there is Doc McCoy, a trained doctor who can silently eliminate opponents with his lethal injection. He throws his doctor’s bag onto the battlefield as a distraction, and enemies who then check to see what’s odd are briefly knocked out by a poison bomb. In addition, with his modified sniper pistol he can eliminate crooks from a distance and he has a doctor’s training with which he can also heal companions.
Then follows the bear-like trapper Hector Mendoza. Armed with a sawed-off shotgun and his beloved bear trap, named Bianca, he stomps onto the battlefield. When he has laid out the huge bear trap, he lures bandits with his whistle and thus eliminates enemies from ambush. Otherwise, he has such powers that he can carry away and hide two eliminated enemies at the same time and if he is wounded, he has a home-made liquor that heals him.
Now let’s get to the ladies of the illustrious society. The redheaded Kate O’Hara is an Irish whirlwind. Due to some events in the story that I don’t want to spoil, she has a very special grudge against Frank and the railway company. She can disguise herself and distract opponents with her charm, but also knows how to shoot with her derringer. As a passionate poker player, she often gets herself into trouble, but also leads her opponents on the wrong trace.
Finally, the Voodoo priestess Isabelle Moreau joins the band. She has some very unusual abilities. So she can take control of an opponent for a short time or chain two opponents together with a spiritual connection and what happens to one of them happens to the other. Besides, she is not defenseless with her sickle and can send out your cat Stella to distract enemies.
Desperados 3 Gameplay — Story
Here I will only go into the storytelling, not the story itself. Nobody likes spoilers, me neither.
The stories in Desperados 3 have been a lot of fun. The campaign has some cutscenes that show longer conversations between the characters using the engine. Then you always get a long sequence at the beginning of each mission, which shows the situation on the current map and often brings some story bites as well.
In addition, our characters also chat from time to time in the middle of a mission. And a few times during the course of a mission there are more additional scenes that reveal further details of the story and map, sometimes with surprising twists and turns.
I was very positively surprised how well Mimimi manages to weave together the little stories of the companions and also the big overall story. And how they knit a very entertaining story rug out of it that lies beneath the whole strategy and action.
Gameplay — Missions and Maps
The design of the missions in Desperados 3 is on a really high level. At first, the individual settings are graphically very varied. Components are rarely recycled, almost all buildings, machines, landscape features, etc. are created for this one special mission and are then not or at least not often reused. So you already have the feeling of being at a unique location on every map. Everything seems lovingly designed and handmade.
The maps are usually very three-dimensional. So we can climb on roofs and on cliffs, and also execute jumping attacks from up there. In the same way, there are often deeper areas that allow us to stay “under the radar” of the guards. There are almost always different ways to proceed in solving the tasks. And also the order in which we solve certain areas of the map is rarely directly given. This opens a lot of space for your own planning and does not force you into a linear track.
There are often hidden subtleties on the maps, which you can use for your own advantage. Here there are hiding places like doors or cupboards, or boulders that you can drop on the heads of enemies. Sometimes you can conquer a Gatling gun and then not be so stealthy anymore, or there are oil puddles on the ground which you can light with a torch to burn enemies standing in them.
I also found the maps on which it was night especially interesting. Here, there is a strong impact of light and shadow in addition to the normal visual areas. Every lamp or torch can change the visibility of the gangsters to be defeated and patrols with light make things even more dynamic.
Desperados 3 puts a strong focus on crisp difficulty. The missions are almost always designed in such a way that you can’t just march through, but that there are some pitfalls that make failure on the first attempt very likely. However, with quick saving and quick loading you can more or less use a kind of trial and error system to try out some “what would be if…”. This way you can check out and practice different tactics relatively safely, and then in the end you will be able to perform the best possible variant.
But there are also numerous achievements and special mission awards for each map. Most of the time, these bonus goals include some things that you will definitely not achieve the first time you play through. These goals range from “complete the mission without saving”, “blow up 5 enemies at once” to “complete the mission without triggering an alarm” or a task for speedrunners like “complete the mission in under 15 minutes”. Here there will be some motivation to play through the maps several times and to further refine and optimize your tactics.
Tech, Graphics, Sound
Mimimi uses the Unity Engine for Desperados 3. This well-proven game engine provides a stable foundation. During the entire test period, I did not have a single crash. Also in all other respects, the game is very well developed. Typical problems with new releases, such as performance slumps, obvious weaknesses in pathfinding, or crashing quest scripts did not exist in Desperados.
At this point, Mimimi Games has certainly already collected quite a lot of player feedback with a beta phase and a pre-released demo and obviously placed a lot of emphasis on good quality control. Therefore, Desperados 3 is a very well-developed software, the opponents here are nasty bandits, not nasty bugs.
The graphics are good consistently. No new standards are created here, but all maps are nicely drawn and modeled. I also particularly enjoyed the 3D camera function of the game and the many interactive objects, some of which are hidden in the map. The characters are high quality animated throughout the whole game and also have many different poses and movement sequences.
The sound is also on a high level. The music titles are suitable in western style and also the combat music is pleasant to listen to. Here I would have preferred a little more variety, but I rather enjoy the tracks that are in there. The sounds of the environment and the game characters are numerous and appropriate. Here you could always wish for “more”, but I never had the feeling that the game was too quiet.
I also had fun with the voice acting. The German speakers are well-known dubbing voices, sure they are the same quality in English, and the emotions in the dialogues are conveyed convincingly. This is especially true in the excellently staged cutscenes, which are played in the game engine and have mostly been given their own unique sceneries.
Desperados 3 Gameplay Screenshots
Desperados 3 Test — Opinion and conclusion
A bunch of positive things were already included in the technical part, but Desperados 3 offers some more big plus points. For me, this already started in the tutorials, with 2 special methods the game uses to introduce the player to the features and functions of the game.
There was something that struck me very positively right at the beginning, namely direct insertions in the game world where you had to do something. So you were supposed to jump down from the roof of a house, and the hint that you should jump down was just written on the wall of the house. This method was also used in other places, unfortunately, this was only available in the tutorials. No extra pop-ups or a break to explain anything were necessary here. A simple but very effective way to instruct the player, which I have never seen in any other game before.
There are parchments scattered all over the world, which you can click on if you walk next to it with a character. When you activate such a document, nevertheless, a pop-up window will appear that explains a certain function in detail. Sometimes it is a skill of a character, sometimes the function of interactive items is explained and sometimes there are simply tips on how to solve a trickier problem.
In this window, a text and a short video will always be shown so that you can see directly how the note is meant and how it works. This method was a little less immersion-friendly than the first method because of the pause, but mostly there were more complex clues involved, which could not have been shown with 1–2 words on a wall. On top of that, I very much enjoyed the fact that the clues were always positioned directly at the place where you could really use them. Both were for me very positive examples of good user interface design.
I was also very positively surprised by the implementation of the function to be able to give instructions to the characters during the pause mode. With a little practice, you can solve so many problems by letting several characters perform actions at different places at the same time. The whole thing was easy to control and after some practice, I used it more and more often.
MiMiMi got a lot of things right with the level design. The maps are interesting and very varied. I found the very low rate of reused parts particularly commendable, but overall each level has been a special experience for me, and at a high level all the way through. Almost always there are special features in the maps that haven’t been seen in any mission before, and that makes it a great gaming experience. As an interesting gimmick, there is also a well-done replay mode, which allows you to watch your game again on a tactical map in fast motion after the mission is completed.
At least when you play through the missions for the first time, they also offer a lot to tinker with and try out. Later you can tweak some things and 100% players and Achievement Hunters will enjoy the many challenges. The total amount is, with 25–30 hours playing time for fast players and estimated more than 100 hours for connoisseurs and achievement collectors, also in a good range.
Desperados 3 is packed with challenges and achievements, for players who don’t want to play through the story just once. But if the challenge is not that appealing to somebody, or the other way around can’t be high enough, there are a lot of possibilities to fine-tune the game to your personal preferences, besides the usual difficulty settings.
The 5 heroes themselves are the icing on the cake of the already great overall concept. Each character is very unique, has special abilities, and allows completely different approaches. The stories around the troupe are presented in an interesting way and each of the characters seems to be coherent and credible in itself.
Overall Desperados 3 has become a great game. The story is gripping, the levels exciting, the characters well-designed and implemented. It’s been some time since I could find that little to complain about in terms of technique, storytelling, or scope as I did with Desperados 3.
Desperados 3 Review — Rating
Desperados 3 makes it difficult for a reviewer to find points of criticism. A great story, high-quality level design, interesting characters, good scope, and a technically clean implementation make this game a real hit.
I would, therefore, like to use 90% as the base valuation. And for the particularly good UI design and the innovative user interface, I give away 2% as a bonus. For an even higher rating, even more, innovations would have been needed, and for that, completely new ways of playing would have had to be developed.
This brings me to a final rating for Desperados 3 of 92%. If I had a Gold Star Bonus Super Award to give, the game would get that one too. No strategy fan should miss this wonderful pearl. Unless you really don’t like cowboys, because there is no way around them in Desperados 3, not even with sneaking.
Great work, MiMiMi Productions, rarely has it been such a pleasure for me to test a game as in this case.
by Zap von ZapZockt.de
Outro
Do you want to become a gunslinger and shoot up the bandit gangs right away or do you prefer to go slow and sneaky? But maybe there are too many cowboys in this game for your taste? Please write me your opinion, I am looking forward to it, just as I will be happy about a subscription or a thick thumbs up. More gaming news, game reviews and tips and tricks can be found on ZapZockt.de and then I wish you a great day, ciao ciao, your Zap
Dev Webseite: https://www.mimimi.games/
Desperados 3 Steam-Page: http://n.thq.com/v3RJ30qMxuq
Buy Desperados 3 cheaper at Gamesplanet:
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Originally published at https://zapzockt.de on June 17, 2020.
