Commandos 2

Games
1

I’ve been waiting quite some time to get this game, mainly because I didn’t want to pay full price for it.

Anyway, I spent an awful amount of time with the original, and found it to be a quite fun puzzle game in disguise. My main problems with the original, the insane difficulty and the painfully stupid control scheme, seems to have returned with a vengeance in the sequel though.

This must be the first game ever for me where it took me 20 restarts just to get past the first tutorial. Somehow I thought tutorials were meant to guide me along at a leisurley pace, explaining the intricacies of the interface. No such luck here. I get some help in the mission description, but I’m left to discover everything else for myself. After an hour, and extensive re-reading of the manual I seem to have a grip on the interface. Now I just have to memorize 40+ oddly placed hotkeys, because I learned in the original that survival depends on them, and even so I can’t seem to find a bloody key to shift my soldiers from prone/standing mode.

Argh, I know there’s a good game hidden underneath all this, and the game seems to have evolved to be quite a bit more open-ended, but I find it highly annoying at this point.

Oh, if anyone knows the key to make your soldiers stand/go prone, PLEASE tell me.

2

I had the exact same experience. Never played the first one, but instead my experience is with Desperados. I’d much rather play that than Commandos 2 at this point. C2’s interface is a tough nut to crack; I never got the hang of it. And I just plain prefer the compartmentalized and unique abilities of the Desperados characters over the pick-up-everything/jack-of-all-trades elements of C2. I’m sure the characters DO have unique abilities, but they just didn’t seem like it really. Anyway, I recommend Desperados if you like that sort of game without all the unnecessary complication.

3

The original was excruciating: a potentially very cool puzzle game that was destroyed by the insane level of difficulty after the first campaign. I was really bummed that it was so hard, because I thought the elements they had put together were really cool. Even though it was totally stupid that most of your crack commandos couldn’t drive a car or swim, it was still a fun puzzle game for all that.