Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive Review

I loved the fact that the characters know how to hide behind corners, pop out to shoot and then return to cover immediately, and the fact that you have to calm your hand for some time before you can fire a sniper-shot. The trajectories that display the path of dynamite or gas-capsules have also been well conceived.

Enemy AI is good and it varies from character to character. Most enemies will be inconvenient because of their swift movement, which will make it very hard for you to sneak up to them from behind. Then again, there are smarter enemies, which will notice if their colleagues are missing and can see through Sanchez's fishy siesta trick, and the worst faggots between them will even be immune to miss Kate's legs. In fights, they will also act differently - some will act as proper cannon fodder and rush to see what is happening, and the smarter ones will hide and keep a watchful eye on you. The important thing in Desperados is that all maps are crammed with NPCs (neutral people, animals, etc.), and you have no idea how they might react to you. They can remain cool, they can run away, or even summon the sheriff... after all, bounty hunters aren't that popular...

What your enemies think and do can easily be seen on their vision cones. They are relatively complex and will give away both their sight-range, and their thoughts. If a view cone is green, the enemy expects no trouble. Once it starts getting yellow, it means that something arose his suspicions, when it is purple, the enemy is blinded with Kate's beauty, and when it becomes red, he's on to you. This gives you a clear overview of the situation, and you can also set a spot on the ground and see who is able to see it. Oh, and you can still lock the camera to a certain character.

Desperados is visually a very beautiful game. At first, I was really bothered by the ugly pixelized outlines around selected characters, but I soon started to look at thing from a brighter angle: if we disregard this little thing, the rest is pretty much flawless... You already know that the graphics are completely in 2D, they are all really neatly drawn and abundant in details. I have no complaints about a square inch of the game. All levels are rich, varied and beautifully conceived with a lot of small things that improve the atmosphere like grass, dead campfires, various boxes, etc... The only problem here was how to represent what is on the other side of a 3D object... Commandos had this solved through level design, which prevented you from getting behind things. In Desperados you can stand behind a house or a tree, and while you're hidden, only your silhouette will be visible. It's not perfect, but it gets the job done.

The pixelization problem that appears when zooming in or out has been solved by allowing players only to select between three (or on some maps only two) predefined levels of zoom. This was rather a smart solution as it will grant best possible image quality without actually losing anything that would be important for the gameplay. While I'm still on about graphics, I have to mention the high-quality pre-rendered cut-scenes at the beginning of the game and in-between missions. If we disregard some pointless Matrix-like moments and sometimes not too successful skeletal animation, the rest if practically perfect, especially the faces.

I would really like to congratulate the programmers about the sound effects... Poking around the game directory, I found some 2300 wav files, 1900(!) of which being dialogues and sound effects. Most impressive... However, I must admit that I still liked Tiny's comments better...

As for the performance, you can say that Desperados is a demanding game. There are a lot of characters on screen, all of them have their AI, all of them have to be drawn... This can frequently make the game slow down, especially in situations with plenty objects and characters on screen. In a situation where you have a group of characters rushing towards you and you're trying to throw a dynamite at them, you can expect slow-downs even on a 566Mhz/132MB RAM computer with a 32MB graphic card (which is still twice better that the minimum configuration). This can be slightly mended by decreasing resolution or level of detail, but not too much.

There is unfortunately no multiplayer mode, not even cooperative as in Commandos. On the other hand, that is not too much of a flaw, as this kind of a game is not meant for multiplayer gaming after all. More than twenty missions guarantee nice and long fun... if you overcome the game difficulty and occasional slow-downs.