Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines and its rage inducing expansion Beyond the Call of Duty were classic WWII strategy games focusing on small squad tactics with highly trained expert soldiers fighting in almost puzzle like missions, trying to complete all sorts of objectives as quietly as possible to get out alive. The sequel to these games, Commandos 2, continues this tradition in spades, while at the same time introducing new mechanics, commandos and settings. All the classic game-play is there and intact: you command a very small team of specialized elite soldiers who are sent way behind enemy lines to blow-up, infiltrate, or otherwise disrupt vital objectives right under the enemy's nose, all the while being completely surrounded and outnumbered by enemy troops in the way. You still sneak, stab, snipe and distract your way across beautiful pre-rendered 3D backgrounds to get to your destination and back. Commandos 2, however, also introduces a lot more content, tactical options, and new systems. Your men can now take the fight inside structures, instead of simply hiding in them. Your equipment is no longer limited to what you can bring to the field, as your men can now scavenge for new weapons and items from containers in the world and slain enemies. Climbing, diving and swimming are all improved and some missions have additional hazards, like extreme cold or unruly animals. The interface is changed in such a way to accommodate these new systems expertly, enabling you to assign any piece of usable equipment to any hotkey that is shown on the interface. And once you get the hang of its honestly unintuitive layout, lightning fast commands to your troops become second nature. But with these changes (and maybe because of them), Commandos 2 will seem a lot easier to play over its predecessors'. As anyone who has played the first (and especially the expansion) knows, triggering the alarm is almost like a game over in itself. Not only is the offending commando most likely dead, but the enemy will receive constantly re-spawning patrols in the vital areas you need to go that will kill your men in seconds, and are almost impossible to get rid of. Commandos 2 does away with that by only having a finite number of soldiers in any given mission and a lenient alarm that eventually quiets down. In addition, your commandos can cheat death with proper application of med-kits, even after being blown to hell by a tank! Yet the above is not game breaking. On harder difficulties, soldiers stay alarmed for longer and even begin new patrols if alerted and med-kits will no longer bring the dead back to life. Using your new tactics, like covering an area to provide fire for an ambush to make more noise to bring more soldiers to their deaths, becomes vitally important (and even more risky). Overall, a worthy sequel. Commandos 3 on the other hand... It can be described as taking Commandos 2, making unneeded changes, muddying up the interface in an effort to "streamline" it, introducing pointless mechanics (like hugging the wall???),and finally the ultimate sin, sticking a time limit on top. Take all that and wrap it all up inside of sub-par textures and a very very short campaign structure. The missions are done in a more episodic fashion, each one driving the story of that campaign to the next mission. But instead of having a team of commandos at your disposal to complete the mission at hand, you will usually be in control of one or two most of the time, doing much more basic tasks to complete that part of the mission (due mainly to the fact you lack the skills of their fellow soldiers) to move on to the next part. And when (or even if) your men finally meet up near the end of the campaign, there is a time limit to the mission. I know that in a real war, time is of the essence, but it just doesn't fit in this game. The Commandos series at its heart is really a puzzle game, and to play it properly the player must take his time and patiently plan out his strategy and plot out his moves with care. This takes time to do, but these arbitrary time limits destroy this process, forcing the player to make wild and chaotic spur of the moment decisions that only result in tragedy due to poor planing. Because of this, the game just devolves into an exercise in frustration as "Mission Failed" screens appear when your carefully laid plans are punished for being too slow. You then try again, this time to simply get to the objective as fast as possible, but you soon find out your clunky interface in no way helps you out shoot our enemies, and then find out it didn't matter anyway, because you saved in a position that makes it impossible to complete the task. (Damn you double agent!! *shakes fist*) Its not all bad though, the "Saving Private Ryan"-esqe beach storming mission was pretty fun as well as the ship sabotage mission (which is the ONLY mission the Diver is in), but these missions are small enough to be one of the bonus missions from Commandos 2. It short, Commandos 3 took a step in the totally wrong direction. It seemed like the developers wanted to add more spice to the game-play, but ended up killing its flavour entirely. But Commandos 2 alone is worth the 10 bucks. Just don't touch 3 with a ten foot pole. Then again.... at least its not Commandos: Strike Force *shudders*
