Real-time strategy games on the PC are more common nowadays than 15-year-old single mothers, and aside from the occasional title generally disappoint. If you think back a few years you’ll remember an amazingly original title released for the PC (and later on consoles). A title that didn’t rely on resources or tank battles, but a single squad of highly trained badasses taking on the Nazis across fiendishly tough missions. That title was Commandos. Following on (and quite similar to) the Commandos franchise came Desperados: Wanted dead or alive, released way back in 2001. But how does it hold up four years later, now with a spangly-new budget price as part of the Sold Out label?

Set in New Mexico in 1881, Desperados pulls out pretty much every Wild West cliché you can throw a six-shooter at: You play as John Cooper, a bounty hunter determined to track down and bring to justice the banditos who half-inched the contents of a train (mainly a bunch of sacks with big $ signs on them). He’s gruff and doesn’t talk much, has stubble you could grate cheese on and he’s got a hat. He also has a posse of friends to help him track down those nasty robbers too, all with their own personal skills.

If you’ve played Commandos then you’ll know that each character has their own abilities and actions - the driver could commandeer vehicles, the diver could harpoon people, and so on. This concept is used in Desperados, with Cooper being able to not only shoot undesirables, but to throw them a swift knife to the jugular or use his watch to draw guards somewhere, then sneak up behind them and give ‘em the old ‘ear to ear’… Abilities the other characters can use range from lobbing TNT, to tying people up, to seducing them or blinding them with a mirror! You might only use a few of the skills in the first few missions, but as your party gets bigger, and the missions get harder you’ll need to be able to swap between characters quickly and use all of the skills in order to get through it alive.

At times like these you have to try a little trial and error, but sometimes you are just presented with what seems like a brick wall - you can’t get past any way you try. This is where the Save option comes in. In Desperados you’ll be saving more than you will be shooting, as there are many brick walls thrown at you throughout the game, and it doesn’t take much to take your characters down.

This is where the problems began for me. I didn’t mind swanning around knifing any poor sap who got close to me, but it seemed like the missions got extremely tough quite suddenly, then would drop off, then get harder again. The difficulty curve on Desperados is rather wobbly, but having said that, if you’ve played Commandos you won’t lose half as much hair playing this!

The AI in the game is just as smart as Commandos, too. They may look like slack-jawed yokels but alert them to your presence and they’ll turn into that US Marshall from The Fugitive - they’ll call their friends and sweep a huge area around where they saw you before they’re satisfied, and most of the time they don’t stop until they’ve spotted you, as they can even follow a trail of bodies back to where you’re hiding.

Unfortunately your characters are not blessed with any kind of automated reactions whatsoever - they’re completely controlled by you. Although this does eliminate the problems of them doing something you don’t want them to, it creates a whole bunch of new ones. The biggest one is when you have a larger team and you leave characters somewhere while you move the other ones, and they get shot to pieces by a patrol you didn’t see. Just a simple reaction response to being shot at would be appreciated, but alas is not provided…

Desperados is still a very good game. It challenges you all the way through, makes you think a lot, and is completely different to 98% of the RTS games available for the PC at the moment. OK, so the game doesn’t quite get the difficulty curve right, the controls are a bit off, and the slightly aged graphics certainly aren’t the best around (tasty 2-D characters on 3-D backgrounds), but for a tenner this is the best in the West.