"Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive" is an ancient game from 2001. It's a whopping 23 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for any modern gaming display resolutions (or widescreen monitors), hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge, or just a cash grab to try profit from abandonware.

This is a difficult beast to describe. I suppose the best way is to think of this as a game like Fallout, presented in 2D isometric view, with real-time tactical combat, but it's less of an RPG and more of an adventure game with a bit of combat/action tacked on. And of course, the wild west theme. The game did pretty well for the time, in fact, but it's not 2001 anymore, it's 2024. The game is ancient. The industry has moved on, there's a sea of better games than this now. Many of them free, where this ancient relic costs money.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.

It looks and feels dated, it's just not fun to play by todays standards.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

"Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive" is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $5 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again.

For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like "Rainbow 6 Siege", "Mass Effect" or "Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. If you're specifically looking for a quality wild west game on Steam, your choices are slim, but you can't go wrong with Red Dead Redemption 2, it's one of the best games ever made.

I played more recent RTT games by Mimimi Games (RIP) before playing this, including Desperados III. This game has a few oddities of the time in which it was released and lacks the quality of life features found in the modern games (and of course is a graphically dated game in many respects), but it capture much of the spirit that the modern RTT games I've enjoyed excel at.

I will say that I had a hard time getting the game to run properly until I found some advice in the Steam Forums. After that, I did not encounter many issues getting it to run properly. However, I would recommend searching for the manual because the game does not do a great job of telling you what the controls are (this is true of many games of this era). For instance, I did not know how to quicksave until level 3 or so...