Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive

For an old game, it plays very sluggishly on my super fast high end PC. It always sucks when you put money down on a really old game and expect to get some good gaming only to be disappointed in the compatibility with newer hardware

I like the game's setting, but it's hard to learn the controls. Fortunately, the beginning of the game is a tutorial. But as others have pointed out, while the game tells you what to do accoustically, there are no visual cues. For example, it says "push the crouch hot key or click the icon in the bar". Well, any other game would tell you what the crouch key actually is. I had to check the options menu to find out. Turns out the crouch icon that I could click alternatively was a 10x10 pixel Icon in the HUD that you could barely see. Well, the story goes on. The game tells me to "Open the door". I can see like 5 doors. It says when I hover over the door, the cursor will turn green/blue/red. Well, nothing happens. I find out that I accidentally de-selected the main character. I hadn't even noticed he could be selected as there was no indication, nothing like a health bar that tells you this is your active unit. Well, then I managed. So I learn how to shoot and throw knifes. All fine. Then my buddy in the game knocks me out and I'm told to catch him. So I go after that bastard. Game tells me I need to take care that he doesn't detect me. So I approach him and ooops he notices me. What happens next? He runs off and it's game over - have to restart the tutorial from the beginning. 10 minutes wasted. Did not want to do that again. I could have saved the game - but well, who'd expect this to happen?

If you were to play only 5 'retro' games in your life, this one should be on your list. It holds amazingly well (I played it for the first time only recently). Sure, low resolution, jumpy animations and being 2D, without a possibility or rotating or even often going behind things, distinctly remind you this isn't a modern game, but it makes up for it in quality, oh what quality! Characters, while partly following the mechanical archetypes set by Commandos and thematic archetypes set by spaghetti westerns, are more varied and cooperation between them is much more important. Above all, you can finally chain multiple actions to be triggered independently with each character, which gives that 'heist' film feeling. I actually got to like some of them, which for an RTS game two decades old is quite uncommon. But were this game shines and distinguishes itself among peers, is level design. They come of as wonderful, intelligent puzzles with multiple solutions, and while the game is hard and very unforgiving, none of my deaths felt unfair.T he locations are really beautifully drawn and cover all typical tropes you could associate with 'old west' films, down to the classic train station shootout, so while mechanically you are essentially doing the same thing again and again - carefully taking off a couple o dozens of enemies one by one utilising various tricks - they offer a quite decent variability, especially in layout and objectives - bank robbing, prison breaking, pueblo infiltrating, you name it. Unlike in Commandos, thanks in part to the story (absurdly cliche, but there), I always had a desire to play the next level, rather than leave the game for a couple of days. Nowadays, I typically play games in short bouts when I just need to take my time off and few titles grab my attention for a long time at an end, let alone give the satisfaction of watching a masterpiece of a film, but Desperados was an exception.

Welcome to the wild west. You have different characters with different tricks. Everyone should be used at the right time because trying for a rampage is absolutely deadly. This game takes a lot of your tactical skills and improvisation. You have one goal and a lot of time for experiments to reach it. But you should be aware of a lot try and error (and dying). The maps are in 2D and lovely designed with impressive details. Also the voice actors made a good job, there are some bad surprises in the missions and the atmosphere is brought to you unforgotten. Only the long tutorials and missing possibility to skip scenes is strenious. Also the story is an absolute typical clichee. But who wanna play an interesting story, when you have a game kicking your mind in case you aren't totally aware of it?

I loved this game back in the day. Today though...It's far to janky. When i found myself slamming on the "STAND UP" command and getting absolutely nothing because John Cooper had accidentally crawled into a wall and locked up, that was it for me. It's only barely playable by today's standards.