The game itself is alright although it does have some flaws like it's iffy stealth and disguise mechanics. The action is fun although you get certain weapons way too early.
Unlike the first game, the games has much, much larger areas, while you are given SHIFT to look around it's not enough. It goes from a fast paced action game to a snail's pace "stealth" game. And not as much freedom with masks, if there even ARE any. Much worse than it's older brother.
I mostly enjoyed HM, the gameplay is fun and just annoying enough to make you want to play the game, the story does shine light on the characters, it's atmospheric. The game takes usually about 5h, I beat it in 3h and 46 minutes although that could be attributed to the "stronger" masks. Some of the level design isn't perfect though, hence the 4-star.
and it's a pretty decent sequel to the Desperados series. I've been torn whether this games deserves a five star, on one hand it's much better and more polished than Shadow Tactics, on the other, the gameplay can be immensely frustrating because the whole game is made on the basis of quicksave/quickload and not killing/knocking out anyone is usually never worth it because it's inconsequential and there is no penalty for killing too many people. So it's not a stealth game in the regard of sneaking about undetected, more so about stealthily taking down enemies. Another good thing is that Mimimi gave rope to tie up unconscious enemies, although they kind of overkilled it with the amount of characters that carry rope, it's a welcome addition, since knockouts in the ST were painfully useless. Lastly, the story was meh and the ending was extremely anti-climactic, that's all.
Although it's better than Invisible War, it's worse than the original game. It's still simplified, no skills, only augs, your character is a jack-of-all-trades will all weapons and so on. The takedown system could have been better, takedowns cost 1 energy cell and they pause time, making takedowns pretty much trivial. Non-lethal is easier than lethal (for the record, it should be the other way around) making the "pacifist" run pretty much the same as a lethal run, except you aren't murdering people left and right. Unconscious NPCs are basically the same as dead ones unless someone finds them, to be fair, HR could have benefitted from being new and made it so knocked out people woke up after some time or after progressing the story, especially since even when you return to Detroit, people you knocked out are STILL unconscious. It's a good game on it's own, but it falls short when you compare it to the first game of the series.
If you expect any difficulty from this game, you shouldn't buy this game... it's mindless fun. Even though this game is criticized to death because it's not a good sequel or it's short areas, it's a great deal of fun. Pick it up if you just want to kick back and brutally murder the cities of Seattle and Cairo.
If you ignore the atrocious stealth and it's other shortcomings, other than that it's a great story and an intriguing one at that.
I had high hopes going into Shadow Tactics, even while playing it, the first four levels were enjoyable however the missions after the fourth one just became chores and increasingly boring, which explains why Mimimi just straight up tells you to save scum. Non-lethal is absolutely pointless, not even ONE of the characters to tie up enemies, I don't even know why non-lethal was added since it's only somewhat useful on civilians and even then killing civilians is inconsequential. Speaking of non-lethal, the levels end up boiling down to kill everyone and spamming F5 and F8. I'm not even gonna speak of the AI since they forget where you are when you climb a vine... :|. Thankfully, Desperados III improved on most of these aspects :^).
Definitely worth playing, although the game has some awful level design at times, forcing you to fight NPCs. Still that's only a tiny part of the game, so the 5 star is deserved.
