Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive is a tactical game from 2001 by the German studio Spellbound Entertainment, published by Infogrames. It belongs to the real-time tactics genre that the Commandos series made famous at the turn of the millennium — but Desperados swapped the war-torn battlefield for the Wild West and became the genre's definitive western.

From a top-down view you command a small band of gunslingers, each with different skills, and your job is to thread them through towns, canyons and camps crawling with enemies. A frontal assault is almost always a death sentence; the game wants you to watch patrol routes, plan combinations of abilities and trigger actions in precise concert. Every mission is a piece of clockwork the player takes apart gear by gear.

The western styling is more than scenery. Stagecoach ambushes, dusty streets and the pursuit of an outlaw with a price on his head give the missions a natural dramatic arc that war-themed tactics games had to work much harder to find. Spellbound also lavished care on environmental detail, so the maps reward slow, thorough exploration.

The title earned a permanent place in the genre's history — it received sequels and modern successors years later and is still cited among the peaks of Commandos-style tactics. For patient strategists it remains a full-strength challenge rather than a museum piece.

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