Reviewed: June 7, 2006
Reviewed by: Jeff Gedgaud
Publisher
Atari
Developer
Spellbound
Released: May 9, 2006
Genre: Strategy
Players: 1
ESRB: Teen
4
7
4
5
5.0
System Requirements
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
Desperados 2: Cooper’s Revenge follows the Wild West adventures of John Cooper and his gang of, well, desperados. Atari and Spellbound have published the sequel to the 2001 game Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive but failed to interest this reviewer with anything new or unique. The gameplay and story are there but there is not much else to give the genre a boost.
Desperados 2 takes place in the Wild West and adds some different weapons and abilities than a World War II strategy game but the same combat tactics and strategies work just as well. The games AI is so bad that you can use your gun and literally mow down all the opposition using terrain and scenery for cover. I found that completing some levels merely meant killing all the bad guys’ one at a time and moving on to the next scene.
Desperados 2 starts with a tutorial mission with two of your characters, John Cooper and Kate O’Hara to get the general movement and abilities down pat. Using their abilities like a six-shooter or knife for John and seduction or a derringer for Kate you move around town accomplishing silly goals. The start of the story finds Cooper’s brother tortured and dying with your final promise to him being revenge on the man who ordered him killed. In this first mission you also find your friend and first cliché of the story Doc McCoy.
You have a few goals during each mission and this first one is to start off the story line of getting revenge for your dead brother. So its revenge time with you and your friends strolling different areas of the west to find the bad guys and kill them. Along the way you will also help out a wagon train that is ambushed by Indians, cliché ridden isn’t it, sneaking into a frontier fort to rescue your friends and later helping the same fort from an ambush. Other missions have you rescuing other characters that join your party, rescuing some Native Americans and eavesdropping on the bad guys to get information.
After a couple of levels you get the idea on how to proceed through the game without many problems. Some missions have you sneaking around but most can be accomplished with bold kill everything that moves style. All the characters have four different abilities and using the guns is my favored way to bull through each level but you do have a few areas that you need to sneak in and do things quietly.
The six shooters or other guns your characters carry are pretty much unlimited in the ammo because you get some from just about every person you kill. You also have other weapons depending on the characters such as a bow, sleeping gas, bombs or just plain old rocks. The other abilities are things that are limited in their use such as your Native American has a war cry to encourage friends of his or Kate’s seduction or sleeping makeup.
Desperados 2 uses third person and god view well with a number key assigned to each of your characters and the tab switching from one view to the other. You can easily switch from one weapon or ability to the other when in god view as they have a selection in the corner of your screen to choose each ability or you can use the F keys on your keyboard. But when you switch to the third person view they get rid of all the screen clutter and you have to remember what keys do what.
The zoom and movement using the mouse in god view are a bit different than most other strategy games but you get used to using the right mouse button and moving the mouse for these. In the third person view the game works just as well but there are some problems with the AI that you quickly find out and take advantage of. One flaw happens when bad guys all line up when coming around corners so picking them off one at a time is very easy.
You can also use Doc with his sniper rifle to pick off the enemies from a distance quite easily. In one scene while trying to rescue two friends this is my preferred method due to the nice step setup of the bad guys hideout and how the AI has them mulling around till you get into pistol range.
Other areas that make the game frustrating are the control issues with your characters doing what you want them to. I often had to repeat areas of levels because a character would not move or do what I told them to. Some frustrating points are the time it takes for your characters to draw their weapons or the problem of opening a door while holding a gun.
Desperados 2: Cooper’s Revenge has some very standard gameplay but with a very inconsistent AI that does not take anything for granted. At times the shot of any weapon will bring every bad guy in earshot running to you and other times they totally ignore you blasting away their friends from ten feet away. You get used to these problems and lack of consistency and use it to your advantage.
Desperados 2: Cooper’s Revenge has some very good scenery and graphics with well-modeled main characters. The games texture detail for buildings and scenery are well made and the game looks good while playing. The cut scenes are rather poor though and could have been done differently but this doesn’t take away from the gorgeous scenery of the Wild West.
The characters you play are well rendered and modeled very nicely but the other characters usually have two different models for each type in the game. You get quite used to the same characters running around or you shooting down one after the other but in a few scenes there is a variety to some of the extras.
There is a good assortment of detail, texture and other graphics settings to adjust the game to your system. I had no problem with the frame rates at all high settings except when there were a lot of enemies on the screen at once. A couple of places I had some slow down due to many of the bandits congregating in one small area but had no problem picking them off one at a time from a distance using Doc and his sniper rifle.
Desperados 2 also has rather long load times between levels but I liked how they showed the progress of the load. They used an old looking map with red lines along the roads toward your next destination as the level indicator of each loading. The graphics looked very good but they should have taken as much care and improved the AI to make a better game.
Desperados 2: Cooper’s Revenge has some time tested and true Western themed music that plays well even though it is exactly what you would expect to hear. The sound has some settings for volume of the various parts like effects, voice acting or theme music.
The voice acting is rather lame but it all sounded fine with nothing exceptional. Some of the voice acting and sounds as well as other parts of Desperados are very cliché ridden like Doc’s snarl that occurs very often when you’re playing his character.
Although Desperados 2 plays well enough it seems like they are trying to pull all kinds of different game styles and techniques to result in a different game. The sneaking around and having to do things quietly is too reminiscent of Splinter Cell games while the outright gun play is more like any of the multitude of World War II games out there. I would not return to this game to play it through again and found that just getting things to work correctly was hard enough.
It seemed like they did not have enough things in the storyline for you to accomplish so they tossed in one whole section dealing with some settlers and Indians. It takes several tries to run through each level of the game because of the inconsistent Ai and control problems so the game is more frustrating than fun. I really found Desperados lacking in any new kind of game style and was disappointed in most of the things they had you doing.
Desperados 2: Cooper’s Revenge is a different but average historic strategy game based on the Wild West. The game is so cliché ridden that it is not even funny like Doc’s snarl and eye patch or the theme music you have heard in about every western on TV or at the movies.
The AI is really bad and inconsistent so completing many of the missions is a matter of trial and error with some luck thrown into the mix. Some of the missions are merely a matter of mowing everything that moves down and this seemed a bit easy considering the fact that it is based at a time when guns were not exactly accurate weapons.
With the control problems and the rather lackluster AI I would be hard pressed to recommend this game to anyone. There is a decided lack of Western themed games so if your looking for something different in a strategy game this would surely fit the bill.