In the quickdraw world of the Wild West, after all, you’re not going to survive long if everyone sees you coming. With your squad of five each bringing a rather unique set of tools to the frontier, you’ll have to make smart use of their abilities to succeed. Sitting at a 96% ‘overwhelmingly positive’ rating on Steam, it’s clear that Desperados 3 delivers on its premise of a “story driven, hardcore tactical stealth game.” It certainly draws from Shadow Tactics before it, which itself gave me a feeling I haven’t had since I was introduced to the classic Commandos games of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s as a youngster one of my first real tastes of tactics.

If you missed out on Desperados 3 at the time, you’ll definitely want to snap it up quickly in this Steam sale while it’s at a bargain price. A prequel to the classic Desperados games, it follows a band of five unique outlaws on their travels across the Old West, getting into all manner of scrapes and shenanigans. Desperados 3 is one of the coolest strategy games in recent years, a Wild West adventure that blends the tactics and stealth of XCOM with the real-time strategy of Commandos and developer Mimimi Games’ own excellent Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun.

Wild west: new frontier game