It’s taken me the better part of a year to get around to Desperados 3. This may seem a little odd given how much I liked Shadow Tactics, the previous game from Desperados 3 developers Mimimi; however, there’s a few reasons for that, first and foremost of which is that, historically, I haven’t liked Westerns as a setting for videogames. I’ve played a few across a range of different genres — Red Dead Redemption, Call Of Juarez: Gunslinger and Hard West are the ones which immediately spring to mind — none of which struck me as being particularly bad, but none of which I managed to stick with for more than a few hours. This is strange because I am quite a big fan of movie Westerns, particularly anything from Sergio Leone, but I can never take them seriously when they’re transplanted into a videogame; matching the mechanics to the setting is always a sufficiently contrived process that I end up feeling like I’m wandering around inside a knockoff version of Westworld and quit shortly afterwards.
This is why I never took the time to go back and play the original Desperados games, and it’s a big part of why I’ve dragged my feet on installing Desperados 31 until now. I’m glad I did though, because now that I’ve finished it I’ve realised two things:
- It is possible to make a decent Western-themed videogame which doesn’t have to contort itself into unusual shapes to fit into whatever the genre du jour is, which conclusively proves that the problem doesn’t lie with the setting.
- If I’d actually bothered to play it last year, Desperados 3 would have been a serious contender for my GOTY 20202.
- The other reason is that it was published by THQ Nordic, a company I am trying to avoid giving money to after somebody pretty high up in the company decided it would be a great idea to do an AMA hosted by notorious internet toilet 8chan. ↩
- It would have lost to Hades, but I don’t think I played anything else last year that would have beaten Desperados 3 to second place. ↩