DESPERADOS III announced, from the makers of SHADOW TACTICS: BLADES OF THE SHOGUN

Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun was my favourite game of 2016, an excellent stealth game featuring a band of sneaky samurai and ninjas (not to mention a somewhat disturbingly murdery teenage girl and an old geezer with a sniper rifle for a leg) doing special missions for the shogun. Now the same team are back with a similar title in a new locale, this time taking their brand of sneakery to the Wild West. This is appropriate, as the Western Desperados game was a key inspiration for Blades of the Shogun (as well as the WWII-set Commandos series). Even more happily, thanks to the actual licence-holders getting in on the act, this will be the official third game in the Desperados series.

The original Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive (2001) was a very good stealth game, heavily-inspired by Commandos and its sequel but also doing its own thing. Spellbound Entertainment made an entertaining game starring grizzled hero John Cooper. Desperados 2: Cooper's Revenge (2006) was rushed out by the publisher before it was ready and was not a very good game. The developers made an unofficial third game, John Cooper: Helldorado (2007) (as they didn't have the rights to the Desperados name) before the company was dissolved.

Desperados 3 will pick up the story with another adventure for John Cooper and his band of, er, desperados. You will be once again robbing trains, assassinating people and stealing stuff, hopefully with no-one else noticing anything at all. This game will differ from the previous Desperados games with the introduction of towns and public areas where you characters can hide in plain sight, a bit like the Hitman series.

Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun was an underrated masterpiece of a game, so the same developers working on a similar game is great news, although it's a bit of a shame that they couldn't keep using their Shadow Tactics brand name.

Despearados 3 will be released in 2019.