Desperados 3 announced, led by Shadow Tactics developer Mimimi

Developer Mimimi, which made the excellent stealth game Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, is reviving the Wild West, real-time tactics series Desperados.

Desperados 3 will arrive at some point next year, and you'll control five characters—outnumbered every time—across missions in "frontier towns, desert canyons, Mississippi swamps, sprawling modern cities and many more". The gang is led by John Cooper, hero of the previous games.

The developers promise you'll have multiple ways to tackle each mission. You'll be able to go in loud or keep to the shadows, taking out enemies one by one, and you'll also have non-lethal options, if you're feeling kind.

That variety is highlighted in the trailer, above: it doesn't show any actual gameplay, but it gives you an idea of the different ways you could approach a scenario, which includes, apparently, taking out a Gatling gun nest by using a black cat.

The previous two games in the series were made by German developer Spellbound Entertainment, which folded in 2002. Nobody from Mimimi worked on them, according to this Reddit AMA from last year, but the team is "good friends" with those that did.

Look out for a preview of Desperados 3 in the next issue of PC Gamer, which is out on Thursday.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.