Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive is a top-down isometric real-time tactics video game that takes place in a Wild West setting.
The main protagonist is John Cooper, a lone rider skillful with his gun as much as his knife, who is hired as a bounty hunter to stop a series of train robberies perpetrated by a mysterious bandit known as El Diablo, but soon discovers his mission is far from being as simple as it seems.
During his journey across the Wild West and its 25 levels in pre-rendered 3D - from a Mexican village to gold mines and rocky canyons - John will gather a team of partners old and new to aid him in his mission, including Sam Williams the expert in explosives, Kate O'Hara the seductress, Doc McCoy the safecracker and sniper, or Sanchez the Mexican outlaw.
While the gameplay is largely similar to titles from the Commandos series, even including similar features like the spyglass to see the enemies' field of vision, Desperados doesn't emphasize stealth as much, allowing shootouts to happen in many situations if planned carefully.
Spellbound worked on add-on levels (mostly leftover levels from development) which were supposed to be released periodically as so-called "Webisodes". However, those were never release because of Infrogrames' new guideline "PC is dead".
Demo
The demo version is an exclusive level which is not included in the full game. More information can be found in its game entry.
Development
The game was originally signed to the small German publisher Blackstar Interactive GmbH and had a completely different scenario inspired by the movie Wild Wild West (1999) with various supernatural elements like zombies.
Official Home Page (Infogrames official site containing english, german, french, american and international sites and all the info needed for this game.)
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