Bought this as a pack together with Desperados 1 and Helldorado, after discovering the magnificent Shadow Tactics, moving to Aikos Choice and finally completing Commandos 1 after all those years. Plan was to play through all games and then hop onto the Desperados 3 train, once all DLCs are out and there's a reasonable bundle for all of it (demo is great). I quite like the genre...after neglecting it for so long! Good Lord, what a waste of time and money Desperados 2 actually is. Controls are UTTER trash. In tactical (overview) mode one needs to shift view every so often which is terribly awkward, and in first person mode (yes, "ATI/AMD cards are not supported" - I got one), FPS drop down below 5 when facing the open world. Voice acting is bad (and not in a good way like Sanchez in the predecessor), general graphics and style are questionable, loading levels and quickloading takes considerable time (on a machine that came out 15 years after game release). AI is super dumb as is clear from the first interaction. There's cheesy music again, that's alright though. I haven't even completed the first level, the clunky controls plus the laggy execution of actions is just abhorrent. This would be bad as a tech demo for funding or even an early beta, but apparently this was a full-price game and GOG got the enhanced version. Mind blowing. Stay away, buy Desperados 1 or 3 instead.
Got it for free on a promo event and likely would have never bought it, but now that I have completed all missions I very much look forward to a paid copy of the spinoff Aikos Choice. You know, it's Commandos in a Japanese setting, graphics and system requirements are fine, controls are sometimes fiddly (but the quickload function is working well), and emptying the maps is great fun. I rarely sneak by an enemy, but I understand that going the stealth route is also an enjoyable puzzle for some people. Audio is excellent and Kuma is the cutest thing ever. Look at him, the animation is beyond fantastic, it's cuteness overload. One star deduction for gameplay annoyances for achievement hunters. Goals are not shown until the first map completion unless satisfied by specific actions, e.g. killing four guards with a grenade. But for things to avoid, e.g. moving on loud surfaces, the "can no longer fulfil" icon simply isn't there and can cost you an entire second run of several hours. Sure, one can still look that up beforehand, but in my run of mission 11 where water is to be avoided and instead a bridge needs to be cleared, I lost that achievement to a bug after killing the first four guards, literally a hundred meters away from any body of water. And I only saw that after completion when reviewing the oldest savegame. That's frustrating for no good reason at all, and not even fixable by a longer chain of quicksaves kept (three sometimes isn't enough). Plus, some achievements are mutually exclusive, which can be avoided with a regular savegame if known beforehand. That's basically all I can complain about, the rest is dope. The game is absolutely fun for 30 to 50 hours of gameplay with a reasonable rise in difficulty level. If you liked Commandos back then, you absolutely should play Shadow Tactics as well.
