Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive

Desperados is a 2001 real-time tactics game from the German studio Spellbound. John Cooper, a bounty hunter, takes a contract to catch a bandit behind a run of train robberies, and gathers a gang of specialists to do it: a doctor with a long-range pistol, an explosives man, a woman who can charm guards away from their posts, a strongman, and a young woman with a trained animal.

It plays like Commandos: an isometric map, guards with visible sight lines, and a small team with complementary skills, controlled in real time. It added a Quick Action, which lets you set one action for each character and trigger them all at once.

It is the best of the early Commandos-likes, with a warmer tone and more humour than its model, and characters who play more differently from each other. The Quick Action is the start of a line that runs to the Shadow Mode of Shadow Tactics.

Its missions are long and hard, and saving often is part of how it is played.

Desperados is Commandos with cowboys, and that is a compliment. It keeps the specialists, the sight lines and the puzzle maps, and adds a simple way to coordinate characters at once. That small addition is what later games took from it.