Commandos style real time strategy game focused around a Russian resistance group in 1941. A larger focus on being able to engage in direct combat than most games like this, as stealth or avoiding kills is rarely required, weapons of different qualities can be found and upgraded as well as traps and grenades. Characters gain experience from kills, objectives completed, and side missions you assign them at your camp between stages and can learn new abilities, passive skills, or increase their hit chance with weapons. Between missions you have a camp where you can assign characters tasks like missions to get them XP or to gain equipment, tasks to gain food or resources, building mines or grenades, etc. A lot of elements never amount to much, your morale should always be at max so that's never a thing that matters, getting food is never really a problem, upgrading weapons and crafting explosives feels like an afterthought, all the looting is just time consuming.

Bigger problems with the game are that Desperados 3 added the thing most needed in this genre, a fast forward button, and that's always going to be missed. Unbalanced, enemies are never set up in a difficult way that really requires you to use skills of multiple characters, some very overpowered abilities. Not a great idea to go for achievements requiring stealth as what actually counts as detection can be buggy and completing main objectives can just alert anymore for no reason. It doesn't know how to handle height or cover when it comes to your enemies cones of view and having no difference between things that are standing, crouching, or on the ground is unfortunate. If you go for a more combat focused playthrough one of the biggest bugs is that they just won't reload guns and if you manually do it they go through the animation but nothing happens (opening inventory and unequipping and reequipping seems to get it working again). You can go into a time slowed mode where you can issue commands to all your characters to try to sync up actions but you really can't do things like have them move in together to each stealth kill an enemy as your window between an alert going off is probably around one second and it is one of the kind of games where it doesn't matter if an enemy is able to say/yell/radio/etc a warning because the alert comes the second they see anything (even if that something is the knife flying through the air to kill them).

If you really like the genre there is some enjoyment to be had and I can recommend it but it falls a bit short in many areas always staying around just being an average title at best.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1492566301318938624

Reviewed on Feb 12, 2022


Comments