The game is to the point, there is no BS that wastes your time. The mechanics are boiled down into what matters most, replacing absolute resources with a budget system. Except for the first missions, which are kinda easy, most missions become tense.
It's a very gameplay focused refresh of Diablo 1. What I like about it, is that people who understand game design have thought about what was fun (for them) about Diablo 1 and reduced the game down to these elements. It has a special feature where you can pick how long your game session is. If you want to spend less time, then you have smaller levels generated, or you can have larger levels generated. Loot and XP scales accordingly. More games should have this! I found the gamepad controls somewhat lacking though, but I just plugged the steam deck into my thunderbolt dock (which I use for work anyway) and played the game with KB&M at 4k without issues (it's 2D).
The hand drawn art is quite pretty and some parts of the levels look good too. The meat of the game are the giants. There are 6 boss battles. I liked 2, hated 1 and forgot the rest. Getting to the boss battles is mostly testing your patience. Maybe it's more appealing to new gamers who haven't played much, but for me, there's not enough meat on the bone.
So I got all of the Commandos games somewhere else first (probably the humble store, ergo Steam versions) and since they had pretty catastrophic technical failures, I bought them here again, in the hopes that the GOG versions would work. They don't. I get the same issues: I tried on a modern Win7 64bit machine and the games would display 0.1 fps in the menu, which is such horrible lag that I couldn't even click anything at all. This is true for all of the 2D Commandos titles (Call of Duty, Beyond Enemy LInes and Commandos 2). Sometimes alt-tabbing would freeze the PC, sometimes I was lucky enough to open the task manager and force close the process. Either way, on a reboot, the PC would run chkdsk prior to booting Windows. Every time after I had to force close the game. I'm not adventurous enough to risk data loss while mucking about with dozens of potential workarounds for a trip down nostalgia lane. If you want to risk it, better try in a VM first. Commandos 3 works, but that's the one I don't care about playing.
So I got all of the Commandos games somewhere else first (probably the humble store, ergo Steam versions) and since they had pretty catastrophic technical failures, I bought them here again, in the hopes that the GOG versions would work. They don't. I get the same issues: I tried on a modern Win7 64bit machine and the games would display 0.1 fps in the menu, which is such horrible lag that I couldn't even click anything at all. This is true for all of the 2D Commandos titles (Call of Duty, Beyond Enemy LInes and Commandos 2). Sometimes alt-tabbing would freeze the PC, sometimes I was lucky enough to open the task manager and force close the process. Either way, on a reboot, the PC would run chkdsk prior to booting Windows. Every time after I had to force close the game. I'm not adventurous enough to risk data loss while mucking about with dozens of potential workarounds for a trip down nostalgia lane. If you want to risk it, better try in a VM first.
Didn't look like the type of game I'd enjoy, but I got it amongst other games in a humble bundle, so I tried it out and was very pleasantly surprised! It was refreshing to have non-combatitive gameplay, the dialogue and story was interesting and the music was good. The gameplay is a lot about exploration.
