I do enjoy a good Dark Souls or Skyrim speedrun, for sure, but in those big, open RPGs, speedrunning eventually evolves into using glitches and tricks to bypass parts of the game. Desperados 3 speedrunning may eventually go that route, but I particularly enjoy these early days when speedruns are just watching folks play the game very quickly and very flawlessly. Check out this run through Desperados 3’s second mission by “Optibum” who completes the level in two minutes and fifty seconds. I’ve not yet gotten to play Desperados 3, but for reference, I would often spend over an hour on missions in Mimimi Games’ last tactical stealth ’em up Shadow Tactics: Blades Of The Shogun. Unlike when I play, of course, Optibum doesn’t pause to wait for enemies’ vision cones to move or sit to think about strategy. You can see them furiously clicking the mouse to move Cooper and Doc through the level, skating in and out of view cones and pulling off speedy combo attacks. It’s quick, impressive, and just satisfying to watch like a perfectly looped gif. There’s no Speedrun.com page just yet, but a quick YouTube search shows several Desperados 3 speedruns so far are falling into the any% category. Typically, any% just requires a speedrunner to reach the completion state for the mission (or game) as quickly as possible without worrying about secondary objectives. What I’m most excited for is speedrunners branching out into other categories. I imagine some folks will begin doing 100% runs, higher difficulty runs, or silent runs where they never alert any guards. As I understand it, Desperados 3’s story forces you to kill certain characters, meaning you can’t do a true no-kill run. I imagine some folks will come close anyhow. You can actually try out a demo for Desperados 3 on Steam as well. If ya need more, here are some of the other best Steam Festival strategy game demos currently up for tryouts. If you’re ready to duel before you demo, you can find Desperados 3 on Steam and GOG for £45/€50/$50.
