GameSpot editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Good
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 05/25/2006
- Released on: 05/05/2006
- Originally published on GameSpot: Desperados 2: Cooper's Revenge (PC) Review
As its name implies, Desperados 2: Cooper's Revenge is the follow-up to 2001's Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive, a character-based real-time strategy game that could best be summed up as Commandos set in the Old West rather than World War II. This is a genre of games that seems to have quietly faded over the past few years, but developer Spellbound is taking another crack at it with a sequel. Unfortunately, while the visuals have changed, virtually everything else hasn't, and the limitations of the genre are all on display in Desperados 2.
Cooper and company return for, of all things, revenge, in Desperados 2: Cooper's Revenge.
In Desperados 2, John Cooper's unlikely gang of bounty hunters is back at it again, and this time trying to uncover a mystery that involves Cooper's brother, as well as an old legend. Your job is to guide each character through the level, sometimes sneaking past guards when they're not looking and other times using a character's special ability to negotiate an obstacle. As with the Commandos games, each team member in Desperados 2 has a unique ability that only he or she can access. For example, Kate O'Hara is the team's seductress, and she's capable of showing some leg to distract opponents and then blowing powder in their faces to knock them out. Doc McCoy is not only the medic but also the sniper. Sam Williams, along with his other talents, is the explosives expert who uses dynamite and land mines to get his business done.
Many of the familiar conventions found in other character-based strategy games appear in Desperados 2. You can call up vision cones to show you the field of vision for a guard, and so long as you remain out of the cone, you're out of sight. Enemies have patrol patterns that you must analyze, and you need to figure out the best way to use the terrain to your advantage. Unfortunately, many of the same gameplay contrivances that reared their head in the first generation of this style of game remain in Desperados 2. Guards don't have intelligence so much as a few programmed behaviors that are incredibly easy to manipulate. You'll lose count of the times that you'll shoot a guy while his buddies, who stand mere yards away, don't seem to notice. Also, the guards never really seem concerned that one fewer of their buddies shows up at a meeting point every time they do a circuit of their patrol. If you pick them off one by one and stash the bodies in a dark corner, the enemy will never react. And should someone manage to raise the alarm, all you have to do is duck out of sight, and there's a good chance that the enemy will forget all about you and go about their programmed routines after a minute. Or if you do find yourself in a firefight, watch the AI come at you one by one. However, while this makes the combat seem simple, it's almost anything but.
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