Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive

Desperados is a strategy game in the vein of Commandos, in a western setting. The levels look good even today, the music is great, and the characters and abilities are all interesting. The AI is much smarter and realistic than in Commandos, but - ironically - this is the main problem with this game: it's completely unpredictable. In Commandos, you learned the rules, and played by it, even if they were ridiculous or stupid. In Desperados, you cannot develop a winning stategy, because everyone behaves differently. Sometimes the civilians doesn't care about you, sometimes they alert the guards immediately. Sometimes you can lure guards away with Kate's charm, sometimes you can't. Some enemies get suspicious, when their pals are missing, some are not. Some guards examine the music watch for seconds, some guards go apeshit immediately. See? There is no way you can complete the levels without insane amount of savescumming and trial and error, because you just cannot know what will happen. There are great ideas, for example in the night levels the enemies have reduced vision, but they hear better. Yeah, sound is in the game, which is great, but you have zero indication, how much sound you make. And there is ambient noise too. So again, the enemies maybe hear you, maybe not. You have to try. And again. And again. You cannot stealth through most of the levels, more so, because a lot of times you just have to eliminate everyone on the map. And the levels are completely PACKED with enemies. This makes the game tedious and overly long. The combat and controls are very clunky, and you can die from a single shot. So, quickload it is for the 100th time. To be fair, the game can be satisfying, when you can finally beat a level, and see another one, but I'm at level 13 and I'm already tired and frustated by it. I'd say play Commandos instead.

This game takes the gameplay of commandos to a new step in the evolution of the genre. But despite the gameplay improvements, like all the new and creative abilities of the characters and the new enviromental mechanics, this game lacks in other things that Commandos or Shadow Tactis doesen't, and that is the level design. This game has everything to be awesome, but the maps feel repetitive and frustrating, and the idea of "dificulty" of this game is just pile hundreds of enemies. This things make it a rather boring, long and frustrating experience when you compare it with the other games in the genre.

I loved that game in 2001, when I was a kiddie. Now it's back and I'll play it again - and after the Desperados 3 story again to have the "full" story. The mouse moving really feels a bit laggy, but it's playable. Tip for Linux Mint Mate (19.3 Tricia / Ubuntu 18.04) to start: After the .sh Install the game wont run ("error while loading shared libraries: libSDL2-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory). Found that workaround: All you need to do, is open a terminal and type: $sudo apt install libsdl2-2.0-0:i386 i386 being the Arch for 32-bit. Source: https://www.gog.com/forum/silver/linux_tutorial_how_to_fix_error_while_loading_shared_libraries_libsdl220so0_cannot_open Enjoy!

This rating DOES NOT reflect the game itself. The game is FANTASTIC. This rating reflects the fact that if you are running windows 8 (and I'll go out on a limb and say Windows 8 or later) you will not be able to play the game. I bought Desperados in a moment of nostalgia but couldn't play it because it was running slow as hell on Windows 8. It was so slow that I just switched it off about 20 seconds into the game. If the game gets an update making it compatible with current generations of the Windows OS I'd gladly change my review but so far I'm leaving this as a warning for anyone looking to play this in the year 2017.

I'm a big fan of the Commandos games (especially the first one and its expansion), so expected to enjoy Desperados, but found it a rather frustrating experience and quit in level 10. The game is punishingly difficult even in early levels and has some level design which I found rather questionable. Behaviour of guards is often hard to predict...e. g. you can throw poker cards on the ground, and most guards will be lured to look at the card. However some guards might also raise the alarm (just because they saw a card lying on the ground, not because they discovered one of your characters or a body!)...this happened to me in a level where triggering the alarm means instant failure. Similarly, some guards will raise an alarm when they notice comrades are missing from their usual place. Now this might be realistic (and even innovative as a feature), but since one has no real way of predicting the reactions of guards, this makes the game much more unpredictable and increases the trial and error factor significantly. Feels rather unfair imo. So be warned: Just because one liked the Commandos games, there's no guarantee one will also enjoy Desperados, despite the superficial similarities of the games.