My earliest memory of the Commandos series of tactical stealth games was my dad bringing home a box copy of the original. “The missions take months. Months!” his mate had told him. Get less shit mates, thought I, for I had already played it elsewhere, and knew that the missions took mere minutes if you put the game on easy then rushed your objectives, bonking nazis along the way. I did not rush the new Steam demo for Kalypso’s revival, Commandos: Origins, but it’s still doable inside half an hour. I had expected a little more, but what’s here has certainly given me some optimism that the full game might well be worth sinking – if not months – at least more time than it takes to wildly lunge at a few nazis en route to your objective.
Before loading in, I was offered the following option:
I went with non-historical, mainly because I was worried I was going to get a pop up later like “oh, so you like NAZI flags, do you? You know who else liked Nazi flags?!” (“Crispian Mills” – Graham). The graphics options seem robust enough. I went for high, and the introductory flyover to the demo’s single mission was very pretty, if a lil’ stuttery.
Even if you’ve never played a Commandos game, you might be familiar with the basics here from one of the sadly defunct Mimimi’s absolute belters, such as Desperados 3 or Shadow Gambit. Those games, despite their own wonderful twists and map designs, could fairly accurately be described as spiritual sequels to this series, since the fundamentals bear such strong resemblance. You control a small team of specialists with RTS controls, sneaking around by avoiding enemy vision cones. The vision are divided into ‘don’t walk here’ and ‘don’t crawl here’ sections. You crouch in bushes, perform stealth kills, hide bodies, use gadgets and special abilities, and sometimes coordinate spectacularly gif-worthy team plays.
Even the controls felt immediately intuitive, despite me not having played a Commandos game in years – right down to the soon-to-be-worn-to-nubs quick save and load keys. A very small gripe: the quick save is a little slow, even briefly pausing the game. I feel like a donkey responding to a quick save option with, ah, but how quick are we talking? But here we are.
You start the mission as just the green beret, who’s sort of the thick-armed poster boy for the series. I swear he even runs the same, like someone recently injected a sharp needle filled with testosterone into his bottom. The first gadget I find is a radio, which you can plonk down then remotely activate to lure enemies. Combined with a shovel he can use to bury himself in the dirt, this is a disgusting bit of kit, highly abusable.
Also slightly broken are the marine’s throwing knives. He turns up shortly to help me deal with a higher tier of guard who’s heard it all before, especially radios, and so won’t move from his spot. The knives do have a fairly short distance, but I should point out that kit being abusable is kind of the point with these games. Once you get a full team together, you’ve basically got access to superpowers. When done well – like in Mimimi’s case – the meat of the game is having to stretch all these overpowered combinations to their absolute limit to deal with seemingly impossible scenarios. For obvious reasons, this is something a demo can’t really explore too much – although there were enough instances packed with guards it’d be worth going through twice, I reckon.
I accidentally amber-alerted an inqusitive grunt at one point, trying to sneak my marine up a ladder to push a wardrobe on top of two chatting guards. Am I going to snark the wardrobe for being much more pristine than the only other two pieces of furniture in the bombed-out house and being conveniently placed in the only position that would allow me to do this? No. That’s some early 2010’s game crit shit. Now we ponder the liminality of the space between the house and the guards. Anyway, the guard ran about for a bit, doing a pretty unconvincing but still thorough check of local hiding spots. The nazis don’t strike me as geniuses, but I did notice they’ll sprint backwards while shooting if you try to quickly rush them down with a knife after fumbling stealth.
After clearing out the area, my next stop is the radio tower I’m supposed to take down for my objective. There’s two guards covering each other with view cones between me and it, so I try a little “time shifting”, which is the game’s fancy way of saying “pause”. I have the marine use a throwing knife, and the green beret use his special “holding knife” to take them down. I then lob a grenade I found on a guard – they drop loot sometimes, medikits and the like – at some barrels surrounding the tower, and that’s the mission and also the demo done.
All in all, it seems very solid. The question, of course, is how Claymore’s scenario design will eventually stack up. Abilities are one thing, but it’s how I’m coaxed into using them that really matters here. Based on the most recent gameplay trailer, it does seem to be saving some of its best toys (tanks!) for later, but that’s par for the course. While it does feel a little strange to call a game primarily about throat-slitting ‘comfy’, that’s about where I am with this. It’s doing everything right by not really doing anything wrong, and when you’ve got a formula that works this well, that’s good enough for a wishlist from me.