Xbox

Dear Readers, we may have found the 2023 Game of the Year in Lies of P. I’ll admit, when I first saw the game pop up on Steam, my first reaction was, “What a fricking stupid name.” Once I got over my initial revulsion (and admittedly waited for it to go on a small sale), I dove into the discourse surrounding this game to see if it was something truly worth playing. As far as I knew, it had a gameplay loop reminiscent of the much-accredited Dark Souls franchise, where punishment is your only friend as its core alluring trait.

Well, everyone, we’ve made it. Here we have the final step in the Metro trilogy that, presumedly, you have been waiting for. Following the events of Metro 2033: Last Light, we rejoin our silent friend Artyom as he ventures out from the musky subway tunnels of post-apocalyptic Moscow. It’s certainly an ambitious switch-up of the format that was very linear in the last two games in this series, and they have learned from what worked well in the past. That being said, they didn’t get the balance quite right, and that puts it a tier below Metro: Last Light.

A wise man once told me that while getting to your destination is nice, the journey there is the true reward in the end. Spoiler: It’s me, I am that wise man. At the core, Desperados III is a Rube Goldberg machine masquerading as a spaghetti western. It’s the video game equivalent of a packed freeway, with you being a jumped-up motorcyclist who has a perpetual hard-on for “shooting the gap.” You’ve got to be fast, accurate, and adaptable, or this one may not be for you. I beat this game in 40 hours; here are my thoughts.