I loved this game as a kid, but I spent about 2 hours trying to get it working on Win 10 and just about gave up. Apparently it worked until some update in 2018.
If you want to take a walk down nostalgia lane, there's other games on GOG that actually work.
Couldn't play more than 5 minutes and had to restart once as soon as the game started.
Games starts, talked to the guy that got off the train. kid took my attention for 10 seconds and I apparently missed that he ran off somewhere and I was supposed to follow. He would occasionally call out "Hey, come over here!" but there was no indication of where "here" was. I had ZERO idea of where to go. *Restart*
Ok, I watched closely this time. Followed him. Shot a vase in a window. I was told to reload by clicking the gray cartridge which I could not find ANYWHERE in the UI. I don't have the patience for this kind of crap.
Honestly I only got to the third level before I got so bored of the grind that I quit. Hopefully the later levels have more options but level 2 and 3 basically you just shoot more people than an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, and you probably have to save scum to do so becasue as an isometric shooter it is clunky as hell.
Ironically, don't judge this book by its cover. The GOG screenshots are very pretty. The gameplay is utterly irredeemable.
GOG deleted my original review of Desperados. So I'm trying again, because sensible people need to be warned not to waste their money.
Many of the reviews talk about the "helpful tutorial". No such thing exists. All there is is a demo mode, and all the instruction it offers is in the form of a pixellated screenshot scrawled with vague notes.
It suggests that the game is a shoot-em-up, but if you approach it like that you will get all your characters immediately killed. Not that it matters; there isn't really very much you can do to avoid that outcome anyway.
The tutorial mentions that the characters have individual talents, but other than vaguely describing Kate's without mentioning how it is accessed, it really has no useful information. About generic combat skills shared by the characters it says nothing at all. It makes a "Quick Action Mode" sound like the pause feature in most tactical squad games, which allows you to give instructions to all your characters before releasing them.
But it doesn't work that way. With the mode activated, the character wanders off to get shot after giving it the first command. There is NO way to coordinate multiple characters. There is no pause feature.
Devs felt the need to reinvent the wheel with the UI, and without any sort of info it's a hindrance to your already limited control.
NPCs have conning colours to indicate whether they've detected the characters, but their aggro range is huge. Before you're close enough to do anything at all the NPCs have guns out and blazing, and they never miss. I'm not sure what to think about a tactical squad combat game in which combat is utterly unsurvivable. There are supposed to be stealth skills, but they don't seem to work in that they don't affect the NPCs at all.
My original review called this a game for masochists, and I stand by that. Unless you enjoy failing literally hundreds of times before you figure out how to succeed--if you ever do--you will not enjoy this game.