Selection #28 is for Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines and Commandos: Beyond the Call of Duty. I’m cheekily selecting them both, as they’re very similar ;)
The Commandos series holds a special place in my heart. So special that I’d completely forgotten that the games existed until I made a small “game ranking” program that allowed me to compared a bunch of games against each other and allowed me to pick the best out of the 2 being compared, then sorted them in a big list accordingly. I soon found Commandos shooting to the top of the “fave games list”! And rightly so, as everytime I think about Commandos I think “corr, what a game! They don’t make them like that anymore”. I distinctly remember my school friends and I all owning/playing the game when it was released and loving it (though strangely I don’t remember trying multiplayer – I suspect we didn’t all have the internet back then or something), but finding it extremely difficult. Infact I don’t think I actually completed it – I did at most a 1/3rd of it, and then used cheats to skip through each subsequent mission, each one looking even more impossible than the last. I had no idea if those later levels were even possible, or what kind of crazy person existed that could actually run through the vision cones and stab their way to their mission objectives without setting off the alarms. (Or better: get more than one star on a mission). I can barely remember the expansion, Beyond the Call of Duty. I think my friend had it, but I only played a demo. I do remember Commandos 2 was one of my most eagerly awaited games, and I was definitely glad to play it. I think I did nothing but play that game from release until completion, ignoring everything else in life until it was done. (I think I had to ‘cheat’ in order to find some bonus mission or something)
So now it’s time to find out if anyone can play Commandos 1 without any cheats as well. :)
About the game
If you’ve never played Commandos before, I’d call it a real-time-puzzler. Or perhaps a stealth-'em-up. Or even a small-scale-squad-based-nazi-stabbing-sim, or something. I’d definitely consider it a “unique” game, even if there are a lot of “stealth games” out there. It’s such a unique sort of game that I even consider two games, Robin Hood and Desperados, as “Commandos Clones”.
The game is a point and click real-time sort of game. In each mission you control a handful of “Commandos” characters via pointing and clicking, each commandos has a variety of special skills uniqe to themselves (kind of like the A-Team). e.g. The Green Beret is all about heft: He can climb walls, stab people, carry bodies to hide them away and leave some little distraction box (so he can then stab people looking at it). The sapper carries all of the major explosives, grenades and traps. The sniper has a long ranged weapon, for sniping people with. The Marine has scuba gear, a harpoon gun and can drive the inflatable boat. The spy can dress up in enemy clothing and walk amongst the enemy unseen. The Driver is the only one that can drive cars and is American so therefore has a machine gun.
Your goal as the commander is to use the Commandos and their special skills to complete the main mission objective, which is usually blowing up a certain building inside a heavily fortified Germany base, or killing an important General before he flees in the car, etc. You don’t have to kill anyone and everyone – some missions can be done entirely without contact with the enemy if you’re one of those insane speed runners I see on youtube. But it’s often so much more easy and satisfying to stab a few lone sentries and haul their bodies away in an effort to reduce the number of eyeballs that might spot your stealthing agents.
I remember the game technology was pretty remarkable at the time for 1998 as well: The maps were huge, they varied in local and importantly were beautifully detailed. (I still remember the look of most of them, especially that last castle level). The maps were stuffed full of German soldiers and tanks etc, all moving about on their own patrol rotues, each with their own little vision cones ready to spot you and call “alarm! alarm!”. You could split the screen into multiple viewports and have each viewport on a different part of the map, and even “attach” a viewport to a German solider so you could monitor people out of immediate eyesight of the main screen. And most of all it was fast and real-time. Milli-seconds often felt like they mattered and were counted by the game.
The game comes with tutorial videos, tutorial missions and is very easy to learn and play. I’d recommend learning the hotkeys though to speed up all of the frantic clicking in the backpack. (Especially “1” to select Green Beret, X for knife, H for hand).
pro-tip: My only real complaint with the game is that the soldier AI is pretty braindead in terms of danger anticipation, and sometimes a decent tactic is to hide behind a corner, group select everytone, and spam the pistol. At the sound of the guns being fired all nearby soliders will run towards you and around the corner in a line and you can gun them down. This is a bit of a cheesy tactic and something that ruins the game somtimes, but more often than not it just results in the alarm going off which spawns more german soldiers on the other side of the map, so is “balanced” in that way.
Where to buy + Technical stuff
Lots of places sell the Commandos series at very cheap prices (£2.99), including physical shops. They often bundle Commandos:Behind Enemy Lines + the “Beyond the Call of Duty” expansion together in the “Commandos Ammo pack”, as that’s how it was sold on CD/DVD at the time. But you can get it from Steam or Gog or Humble or a million other places.
I believe there’s some technical different between the version Steam sells, the version Gog sells, the version you can buy on CD+patches… but I can’t remember what it is and don’t really care as I think you only need to care about if you’re installing mods. (Though some of those look quite good)
I’ve seen some reports that it doesn’t work well on modern windows versions, but I think that’s been fixed. My Steam version works fine on my win7 and win8 computers and some forumites even have it working on win10 even though the official line is it doesn’t work ;) Note: There’s no music in missions, but there is in the menus. That’s not a broken or installation or anything, that’s just how it works. The expansion featured ambient sound in missions.
It works fine for me at 1024x768 on my 1440p monitor. There are varying widescreen mods and resolution hacks out there that allow you to play at “modern” resolutions, and often mean the entire map can fit on screen at once, but I found everything so small and all of the zooming in so tedious that I just prefer to play it the old fashioned way.
Technically there’s also a multiplayer mode, allowing multiple people to control different commands on the mission, though I’ve never tried that!
Want more?
If you find yourself liking Commandos:BEL or BTCOD, then there’s also Commandos 2. It changed the formula slightly, but was still a fantastic game. Commandos 3 changed the formula too much, and was crap. There was also some FPS game in the series but it’s crap. (Commandos Strike Force)
Then there’s the two other game series in the same genre (aka “Commandos Clones” ;).
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The fantastic (and possibly better than Commandos) Robin Hood. But the steam version is unplayable and runs at 0.01fps. The gog version might work? Not tried it.
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There’s also Desperados, aka Wild West Commandos, which I’ve yet to try on a modern computer. I’ll play again after Commandos is finished :). The latest game in the series is Helldorado, which came out as recently as 2009!!
There’s a lot of other Stealth and “Heist” style games which I love, mostly due to a stealthy interest that Commandos kicked off, e.g. Metal Gear Solid, Monaco, but I don’t think they have the same feeling to play as Commandos. The outbreak series (HOWWII, Men of War, Faces of War etc) is possibly closest and have missions that tend to play out like a commandos mission, but they mix those inbetween full scale assaults involving hundreds of troops.
Enjoy :)