I decided to try Desperados since I saw it was leaving Game Pass even though, Commandos aside, I had pretty much no experience with tactical stealth games. And to be honest, I found the game so incredibly difficult at first, even on easier difficulties, that four hours into it I was about to call it a day.

I’m really glad I didn’t. Once Desperados III gets its claws on you, its gameplay loop has the potential to become quite addictive, and of course it also becomes easier to handle. It’s a really tough but fair game. The amount of freedom you have to approach all missions (I’ll talk about the only exception to this below) is greatly satisfying, and it’s awesome to see your own strategies come to fruition. The game gives you a ton of tools to explore and combine, and I’d be hard pressed to come up with titles I’ve played over the past couple years where their different systems combined this well. To make everything feel more engaging, you are graced with a surprisingly solid story of loyalty and revenge, well voice acted and boasting really likeable and diverse characters. This is actually one of the things that captivated me the most: every character in this game feels like their own entity, with their very own distinct personality and abilities. Seeing these abilities mesh within your own created strategies is very rewarding. Isabelle was my personal favourite, but they are all so well designed that any of them could easily fill in that slot. To top if all off, the progression mapping you see at the end of each mission, showing you each character’s movement as well as their individual stats, is incredibly fun to watch.

A couple of Desperados III’s shortcomings were really frustrating though. The main one to me was the restrictive ending. Without entering spoiler territory, it felt completely antithetical to the amount of freedom you had up until that moment. I understand that this at its core a puzzle game, but narrowing your options to that extent felt jarring, and made the game go from fun to chore for me personally. Luckily this only happened in that specific moment. Another issue was the lack of navigation polish, as my characters would occasionally get stuck in paths, sometimes ruining a particular time sensitive action I had set for that moment. Camera controls could’ve also been better implemented, at least on console. It wasn’t very bad, but it definitely didn’t feel as fluid or intuitive as other top down games I played in the past. Lastly, even though I enjoyed almost all of them, some missions felt too long. In fact, as a whole the game itself could’ve probably benefited from 2 or 3 less missions. I spent over 30 hours on it, and my addictive side appreciated that the missions kept coming, but if I’m being unbiased I’d say some people might feel it drags on for longer than it needed to.

When the pros are stacked against the cons, you end up with a really interesting experience that has a good chance of appealing to you even if, like me, you’re not experienced with this genre. If that’s the case, Desperados III will likely feel quite challenging at times, especially while you’re still getting your bearings, but the end result is a learning curve that makes you feel like you truly accomplished something when you come out on the other side. Frustrations aside, its good aspects make it a more than worthy recommendation. 7.5/10

Had this recommended to me after playing Shadow Tactics. In many ways it feels like the same game in a different setting. It's built around a series of stock characters and tropes, but it's all competently done. Gameplay is effectively a series of puzzles that you have a good amount of freedom in solving, but restricts you enough to make you work for it. I did feel that the game was too long - each map is quite extensive and there are probably too many levels. This is compounded by the fact that you have to be mentally switched on 100% of the time, which meant I didn't always feel like playing. So even though I enjoyed it a lot, I didn't really have any desire to touch the DLC or extra challenges by the time I reached the end. I think a game that could blend this kind of tactical gameplay with a bit more variation in mechanics could be really interesting.

Edit: I did end up changing my mind and playing the DLC and it was quite good. Tried dipping my toes into the challenge maps and I think they are really only for people who are properly obsessed with the game.