Study the enemy's movements, carefully develop a plan, synchronize your men, then launch them on a swift and fierce attack using all your power and skill. You have been selected for active service in the Commandos Corps, and must now mobilise in dangerous missions. You will be given the opportunity...
Study the enemy's movements, carefully develop a plan, synchronize your men, then launch them on a swift and fierce attack using all your power and skill. You have been selected for active service in the Commandos Corps, and must now mobilise in dangerous missions. You will be given the opportunity to push your daring and tactical ability to the limit. As the leader of a small elite unit operating deep within enemy territory, you will experience real challenges and missions.
Clever strategy has never been so furiously action-packed.
Includes Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines and its addon Commandos: Beyond The Call Of Duty
Tactical gameplay that is both extremely challenging and extremely captivating
A broad range of missions based upon both actual history and popular World War II movies
First off GOG did a great job converting this game. This Win 95 game runs full wide screen on my Win 7 64 bit. And at the correct speed.
Many consider Commandos 2 the best. But i think part 1 nailed the commandos genre right over the head. In commandos 1 you control 6 commandos with very specific abilities. Only some can do silent kills, only some can carry bodies, and then there are very specific skills only 1 person can do.This leads to some very brilliant mission layouts.
Sneak the diver into the camp and steal a raft.
Get the raft to the spy so he can go to the camp and steal a uniform
Get the spy into the base so he can turn off the electric fence.
Use the Sapper to cut the fence and steal the TNT.
etc
I felt in part 2 and 3 they generalized alot of the skills taking away from what made the commandos unique. Plus in part 2 and 3 the AI is better, but i found that only took away more of the experience. Graphics still look great by today standards. Thanks to 2d engine.
I've put so so many hours into this gem back then... and I don't regret a bit. It's an amazing experience, just about anyone I know who tried it loved it, so I'm surprised this type of strategy games didn't get more popular.
Is the kind of games that will make you feel frustrated quite often, for being able to get past some area, but once you acchive that, and beat the level, you feel like you are on top of the world.
Sure, the expansion and sequel expanded upon this concept, and are objectibely better games, the original is still very challenging and well worth your time (and money).. just... prepare to die... a LOT.
Great classics. While Behind Enemy Lines has well balanced difficulty, Beyond The Call Of Duty can be frustrating sometimes, feeling like you need to come up with exactly the solution game creators wanted, with very little room for your own ideas. BEL seems to be more flexible in this department. That said, both are still worth playing. People who've never played any commandos-like games could be surprised that all commandos are ridiculously specialized to a point where they would be entirely useless in the real world. Just think about the game as logic puzzle (although requiring some good reflex and timing too) in ww2 settings instead of tactics stealth real war game.
And if you get directx errors, just use DDrawCompat (if the game crashes with the latest release of DDdrawCompat, try out previous versions) or DxWnd.
A classic puzzle game suffering from a high difficulty level
Commandos is not so much a war simulation or a tactical squad game as a puzzle game using soldiers as its pieces. You control a squad of up to 6 different soldiers in the European theatre of World War II during the infancy of commando units. The commandos at your disposal are a green beret, a sniper, a marine diver, a sapper, a driver and a spy, and your missions range from blowing up a dam or a ship to freeing an informant, kidnapping an enemy commander or stealing a bomb guidance system. The missions generally sport a high level of difficulty, requiring you to map out the patrol routes of the enemy soldiers and wait for exactly the right opportunity so that you can kill them off silently and stealthily approach your objective. A straight-forward, guns blazing approach will almost always result in a quick death and a failed mission.
What makes Commandos a puzzle game rather than a tactical squad game like X-Com or Jagged Alliance is that all of your commandos are highly specialised, far beyond the point of realism. For example, only one of your soldier types knows how to fire a mounted machinegun, how to drive a car or how to row a boat. The game is limited in this way specifically to force you to approach the levels in a certain way, increasing the demands on your puzzling and coordination skills but heavily reducing the realism. Some levels are flagrant about railroading you, others are more open and allow more varied approaches. This leads to high levels of frustration from time to time, sometimes to the point that the game suffers from it, but ultimately also to a great deal of satisfaction when your plan finally comes together.
The expansion pack, Beyond the Call of Duty, adds a number of abilities to your soldiers, such as being able to lure guards by throwing a pack of cigarettes on the ground, knocking them out and forcing them to do your bidding at gunpoint or let your spy steal their uniform. The new features make your soldiers more versatile as you no longer need to rely solely on the green beret to lure soldiers away from their route, now any commando can throw some smokes within the enemy's line of sight and ambush them. However, the expansion also ramps up the difficulty significantly, leading to immense amounts of frustration and possibly self-harm.
The bottom line is, if you want a fast-paced action game with the emphasis on gunplay then stay away from this game. If you like puzzle games, don't mind high difficulty or a "mature" war setting and are willing to suspend your disbelief about the Green Beret flunking out of the boat-rowing class in special forces school then Commandos is definitely for you.
As for the technical aspects of the game, it is an isometric sprite-based game which allows the resolutions of 512*384, 640*480, 800*600 and 1024*786. The soldier sprites could have used more detail, but overall the sprites are good and the graphics have aged well. The interface can be clunky, with the hotkeys not being reconfigurable and important acts such as running not having its own hotkey. Overall it is a functional interface, including important tools such as visualising an enemy's line of sight and allowing you to split the screen into several cameras so that you can time your actions just right. The game has hotkeys for quicksaving and quickloading (and I love them so) but due to the difficulty it is important to manually save in order to maintain several save games at different stages in the mission.
Used to see my father play this all day long, so had to buy it 25 years later to remember those days!
For those who see error with direct x5, change the exe name from comandos to Commandos.exe and you're good to go!
