Shadow Tactics has Aiko, a female character who can put on a disguise to pass unnoticed through enemy areas and who can distract guards by flirting with them she can also throw bottles of sneezing potion to blind guards for brief periods. In Desperados 3, the first character you get is Cooper, a cowboy who can scale cliffs using vines, who can distract people by throwing coins, and who can kill guards by either stabbing them at close range with a knife or by throwing that same knife into their neck at medium range. For example, in Shadow Tactics the first character you get is Hayako, a ninja who can scale cliffs using vines, who can distract people by throwing rocks, and who can kill guards by either stabbing them at close range with a tanto or by lobbing a shuriken into their neck at medium range. What is surprising, however, is just how literally Desperados 3 copies and pastes what I considered to be the more Shadow Tactics-specific ingredients of that game. (This is why I’m not going to waste time in this review explaining the basic mechanics of Desperados 3 - I explained them four years ago in my Shadow Tactics review, so if you want to know the fundamentals of how the game works you’re better off reading that.) It’s not surprising that Desperados 3 lifts all of these basic mechanical tweaks and innovations almost verbatim - in fact, it’s something that’s in fine keeping with the traditions of the old real-time tactics genre, however short-lived it might have been. It has the same interface improvements, the same concept of near/far guard vision and bushes and cliffs obscuring enemy views, and the same ability to issue orders to multiple team members while paused to synchronise guard kills, here rebranded as Showdown Mode. It’s those mechanics that Shadow Tactics almost flawlessly updated back in 2016, and I was hardly expecting Desperados 3 to throw away all of that good work. They all used intricate networks of patrolling guards, oscillating vision cones, and punishing alert systems to create a series of puzzle box levels that your five-member team would have to unpick with whatever tools were at their disposal the fact that said team could range anywhere from a disposable set of Starfleet redshirts in Away Team to a selection of Merry Men in Robin Hood was, effectively, just window dressing around the same core mechanics. This was always going to be the case none of the real-time tactics games that came out of that weird little genre mini-boom after Commandos were drastically different from one another. It’s probably stating the obvious to say that Desperados 3 bears rather more than a passing resemblance to its predecessor Shadow Tactics. If I’d actually bothered to play it last year, Desperados 3 would have been a serious contender for my GOTY 2020 2.It is possible to make a decent Western-themed videogame which doesn’t have to contort itself into unusual shapes to fit into whatever the genre du jour is, which conclusively proves that the problem doesn’t lie with the setting.I’m glad I did though, because now that I’ve finished it I’ve realised two things: This is why I never took the time to go back and play the original Desperados games, and it’s a big part of why I’ve dragged my feet on installing Desperados 3 1 until now. This is strange because I am quite a big fan of movie Westerns, particularly anything from Sergio Leone, but I can never take them seriously when they’re transplanted into a videogame matching the mechanics to the setting is always a sufficiently contrived process that I end up feeling like I’m wandering around inside a knockoff version of Westworld and quit shortly afterwards. I’ve played a few across a range of different genres - Red Dead Redemption, Call Of Juarez: Gunslinger and Hard West are the ones which immediately spring to mind - none of which struck me as being particularly bad, but none of which I managed to stick with for more than a few hours. ![]() ![]() This may seem a little odd given how much I liked Shadow Tactics, the previous game from Desperados 3 developers Mimimi however, there’s a few reasons for that, first and foremost of which is that, historically, I haven’t liked Westerns as a setting for videogames. It’s taken me the better part of a year to get around to Desperados 3.
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