"You remember "Cockup Cascade", right? The term I came up with for an unfortunate feature of many stealth action games where the slightest misstep means getting caught in a pile-on of escalating fuck-ups, so you might as well just reload the instant you get spotted? Well, Desperados III is the patron saint of Cockup Cascade; the cocks barely have a chance to come down again. The enemies all have visibility cones spread wider than your mum's legs when she hears a bottle opener, and you can only see one guard's cone at a time; on top of that, a lot of guards who look like they're staring straight ahead are, in fact, glancing back and forth like a nervous gazelle at a tennis match, covering an area the size of a conservatively-proportioned aircraft hangar. So half the time, you'll settle into the nice, long "slitting a throat" animation, and only then be informed that someone offscreen is looking at you from their table at a delightful Parisian-style street café on the surface of Mars. And thus, the cascade begins. Everyone on the map is alerted and rushes your position, more guards spawn in on top of the existing ones; it's like the fucking fight scene at the end of the original Casino Royale. And while you do have a gun, you fire it once and then can't fire it again until you've remembered all the lyrics to "The British Grenadiers", and your special power to pause the game and queue up your next few actions, at this point, provides nothing besides the chance to take a moment and really drink in just how completely fucked you are. So don't kid yourself about making a stand; you're just going to fucking quick-load. It's not so bad in the early game, but before long, levels are absolutely packed with enemies and overlapping patrol routes, and it turns into a sort of ultra-violent puzzle game, where the objective is to figure out the precise sequence of actions to pick off every enemy in ascending order of gregariousness, quick-saving with every inch of progress. An experience like untangling a huge ball of Christmas lights, turning it over and over, picking on loose bits, occasionally pulling on the wrong thing, getting electrocuted and making all the children scream."