Each week we attempt to break a game in new and interesting ways. Desperados: Wanted Dead Or Alive faces the CHAIRQASITION.
Game: Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive
Devel: Spellbound
Engine: Custom
Price: £4.49 / US$4.99 / CA$5.49
Wazzat: In this western-style title, discover a game of strategy and tactics played out in exceptional real time. You’re in charge of a team of 6 mercenaries and must find a way to complete your missions, be it infiltrating an enemy fortress, saving a team member or escaping an ambush… Combine the different skills of your 6 heroes to lead them to victory.
Venn:
Does It Launch
- Seems legit.
Performance @ 1080
- 25 ferps of glory!
Graphics
- No option for windowed mode.
Control
- No issues.
Jordan:
Does It Launch
- Yerp
- Has some freezy issues when you alt-tab
Performance @ 1080
- Bringing my 1080 TI to its knees
Graphics
- No windowed mode, no resolution
Control
- Click, click and click some more. Sometimes the game gets stuck and you gotta save and reload though
- You can rebind the hot keys
Pedro:
Does It Launch
Performance @ 1080
- 25 FerPS, hope you enjoy that cinematic experience.
Graphics
- No resolution options outside of screen ratio
- The resolution looks like it was 1024×768 and it just upscales to whatever your monitor is set to.
- The ingame graphics are fine, if you like brown.
Control
- In the second introductory mission, after you destroy the wagon, the game didn’t give me back control.
- Tried it several times and always got the same result.
- There’s no mouse sensitivity adjustment.
QA Score:
Fedora:
Soulless:
Ubuntu:
Fun?
- Venn:
- First off, big honking thanks to THQ for giving a 17-year-old game a native port.
- Also, I’m kinda getting a kick out of it not running correctly (if at all) with Win10.
- Full disclosure; i quit playing these type of games in the DOS ages with King’s Quest.
- I don’t mind the RTT genre but at the end of the day it’s not my bag.
- So, what do we have?
- A well done (even by today’s standards) STR/RPG/Stealth game thingy.
- 25 mission
- Semi-passable voice acting.
- Point-and-click adventure mixed with the option to shoot or sneak your way out of situations.
- What’s not to love?
- There’s a gang of shit on the screen that needs clicking to get through the game.
- Crouching, spying, stab, throw, shoot, reload etc.
- I’m guessing the interface made more sense in the days of 4:3.
- It can be a long haul for a 28″ screen @ UHD.
- Fortunately the game has reasonable hotkeys.
- Save save SAVE!
- You cock up once and WHAM, right back to the beginning of the chapter.
- Learned that business the hard way, twice.
- Outside of that I had a good time for what it is, a King’s Quest style joint wearing chaps.
- And if we’re being honest it’s better than 90% of the hipster-pixel bullsh*t on the market today.
- In closing I would like to thank the summer interns at THQ for making this port a reality because I’m guessing that’s what happened.
- P.S. How many times did you try to rotate the map?
- Jordan
- Ahh stealthy games, where I like to play a little sub game called how big can I make my pile of corpses
- Also how many times do I save scum
- I can see how back in the day this would have been quite the little gem
- Sierra quality voice acting is a nice touch
- There’s certainly lots to do, the enemies are smrt-ish a
- The issue I keep coming back to is the king’s quest style control scheme makes it really annoying in situations
- The isometric layout doesn’t help, especially when people run around the backs of buildings you can’t click on
- I think something similar to a baldur’s gate style of gameplay would do this better than the RTS. Something about it rubs me the wrong way
- Pedro
- You know I don’t like real time strategy games.
- Games like this and Commandos are exactly why.
- They’re, in my honest opinion, the epitome of an RTS game.
- If they weren’t so infuriatingly frustrating, I’d probably love them.
- But the way I’m being asked to control the action and the fact the mouse movement is set relative to the games internal rendering, not the absolute monitor resolution, it’s just awful.
- I remember watching my dad play Commandos, even back then I just couldn’t figure out how he was having so much fun with it.
- I’m almost as old as my dad was back then and I still don’t get it.
Fun Score:
Venn: 
Jordan:
Pedro:
