Commandos review

We review Commandos, a stealthy shooter that tries hard but can't quite keep its laces tied up

Published on Sep 4, 2009

War is hell – it’s much better if you can avoid getting shot at. Actually, it’s much better if the enemy never even knows you’re there. That’s kinda your aim in Commandos, to wage war without the enemy even knowing that’s what you’re doing. Well, not until that grenade goes off underneath them anyway.

You control your soldier directly, but you view the battlefield from above and can survey around the whole environment by switching to your binoculars. Yep, in Commandos binoculars even let you see through walls.

Although your soldiers – most missions give you more than one trooper to command – are armed, you’re much better off if you manage to avoid enemy fire altogether. The best way to do this is to scan around the level for the nearest enemy. Click on them while using the binoculars and their field of view will show as a moving green cone. It’ll hang around once you’ve left the binocular view, and stays as long as you don’t select another enemy soldier.

Catch them unawares and you can chloroform them or even knife them, depending on the type of soldier you're using, before they get to take a pop at you

This dynamic is the key to keeping out of harm’s way, and lets you be genuinely stealthy, but some clumsy features stop Commandos from slipping under our critical radar and back onto home turf. Firstly, whenever you snap back to the binocular view, it doesn’t reset its position to the character you last used, instead sticking to wherever you left it. Even if you’ve moved half way across an enemy camp, trudging past a half dozen doorways.

This actually makes it harder to stealth around the place, since you can’t switch between scoping out the area and doing the actual sneaking at all quickly. There are other little holes in the game too, such as the way that, if one of your troops alerts the attention of the enemy, all your other soldiers become targets too, even if they’re disguised as the enemy.

Then there’s the issue with objectives and checkpoints. Commandos saves your progress mid-mission fairly frequently, which is welcome when it’s easy to trip off an alarm and find yourself riddled with bullets, but it’s then easy to lose track of where you’re meant to go if you leave the game and return. Your objectives are only spelled out at the start of the level. You can read them in text form at any time, but they won’t always make that much sense.

The lacking explanation factor runs throughout the game – we get the inkling that the developer’s first language probably isn’t English. In fact, we’d put five Euros on it. Five Spanish Euros to be exact, if such things were to exist. Check out this little excerpt from the help text ‘5: Shoot gun and use hability’. Habilities, surely high up in the list of everyone’s favourite things. In case you haven’t twigged, we think they mean ‘abilities’.

These niggles, both textual and within the gameplay itself, are a pity because they hold the game back from being a truly successful example of what it wants to be – a smart stealth-em-up that’s still casual-friendly. Commandos doesn’t exactly stumble straight into a mine field that sends it sky high as a smattering of bloody bits, but it does demand more patience than it really should do. Still, if you’re got the prerequisite nerves of steel, Commandos is still worth a look.