Desperados 2 is a direct sequel to the first game, taking place two years later. Here, we follow John Cooper's quest to avenge the death of his brother, Marshal Ross Cooper, tortured and killed by a criminal known only as "Angel Face". John reassembles again his team: Kate, Doc, Sam and Sanchez (sans Mia). This time, they'll be joined by the Badass Native Hawkeye from the White Wolf tribe.
It's followed by the Immediate Sequel Helldorado. It was originally planned as an Expansion Pack called Desperados: Conspiracy, but due to Atari missing payments to Spellbound, the latter had to release the game as a stand alone under a different publisher, Viva Media. They couldn't gain the rights to the Desperados name, thus the game is only called Helldorado.
Both Desperados 2 and Helldorado were poorly received upon release. They're generally regarded as generic, buggy, with clumsy controls and overall not having a very funny gameplay. The series was abandoned for a good decade before Mimimi Games and THQ Nordic took over and released Desperados III, with critical acclaim.
Desperados 2 provides examples of the following tropes:
- Art Evolution: Desperados 2 is in true 3D rather than isometric graphics like the first game.
- Bag of Spilling: Similarly to the first game, the inventory is reset at every level. Here this is much more ridiculous since many levels take place in the same map of the previous level, so there's no logical reason why characters should lose their inventory.
- Bottomless Magazines: Completely averted. While in the first Desperados the characters have unlimited ammunition (even if they need to reload), here they can actually run out of bullets, making it mandatory to collect ammo dropped by enemies when they're killed.
- Fake Longevity: Desperados 2, due to the publisher ceasing funding late in development, results to constantly recycling the same stage in a row, with all of the enemies/your equipment being reset, essentially forcing you to play the same level multiple times in a row.
- Forced Tutorial: The first level counts as this, due to following a subplot unrelated to the main story and serving mostly as a way to showcase the game's controls plus John's and Kate's abilities. It's downplayed in the second and the third level, since the game does provide informations about the other characters' abilities, but doesn't always force the player to use them to advance the level.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: Taken to an extreme since alot of levels take place in the same location, which means the entire location gets repopulated with enemies and everyone stops looking for the group of characters who just shot up the town before hand multiple times.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Vaquero (Cow Boy) for Normal and Pistolero (Gunslinger) for Hard.
- It's Personal: Angel Face sends his henchmen to torture Cooper's brother to death to set the stage for the main story.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: One of Kate's selection quotes is "New game, new look." She has a very different outfit from the first game, wearing a low-cut dress instead of a typical cowgirl outfit.
- Mythology Gag: The game's first mission (and Forced Tutorial) is about John and Kate trying to capture a bandit leader called Dillon, the same antagonist of the only mission in the Wanted Dead or Alive demo. Since said level is absent in the complete version, it's canonicity is unclear, that means we don't know if our heroes did capture Dillon in the past and he escaped/was set free, or the events of the demo canonically never happened thus Cooper's Revenge shows the definitive version of the story.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Mia Yung doesn't appear and isn't mentioned. Granted, she was just an 18 years old girl who followed Cooper's team to avenge her father and had no real reason to stick with a team of bounty hunters. But her house was burned to ground and her family massacred in the first game, and it's jarring that we know nothing of her whereabouts.
