Whether you’re settling in a hedge waiting to play around with your thumbs from Command 3 for decades or make Nazi knife on your next past walk. Good things come to those waiting, Commandos: Origins fits that bill. It was slow, challenging and consistently satisfied when all the plans were put together, so its isometric stealth action brand was unharmed and didn’t look better. I sunk nearly 60 hours last week just to see the mission, but it could be available for a few more hours if I come back to regenerate some of them again, with the intention of leaving the soldiers without stones over. The only major issue is the assortment of bugs that I had to get used to in order to enjoy myself. Like the Pesky German snipers, some of these learned how to avoid them completely, but there were others who needed to find a way to neutralize them.
For those who skipped basic training, Commandos is a series of real-time tactical stealth classics set during World War II, dating back to the late 90s. Imagine an elite crew. However, in general, it is driven by the clicks of many mouse that are roaming the belly behind the enemy line. For modern comparisons, it resembles the untalented ministry of war, which was only shot from drones (and without Guy Richie’s wit or Henry Cavill’s fully curled cookie duster). Or the BBC’s illicit heroes have 90% less oaths and 100% less AC/DC.
But while its cheesy, but otherwise stone-faced approach may lack the full humor of those crackling British special forces capers, Commandos: Origins is definitely the best version of the series’ concept to date. It is a familiar yet modern experience for Grizzle veterans, and an intuitive and approachable experience for new players ready to test themselves against a steadily escalating difficulty curve.
Where the Eagles stare
Like any other great stealth game, Origins is just as much a game about tactics as it is a deadly puzzle salvo to solve. It basically involves analyzing future encounters, inspecting the vision cone of each enemy soldier, and finding a way to not bring the entire German army down to the head of the team. Most of my time at Origins was spent simply staring at the screen, investigating prey like an Ambush Predator.
Each of the six commands of a team has a set of unique tools and capabilities. In most cases, Origins curates the characters available for each mission and adjusts the action of the skill. There are only two instances where all six soldiers are on the same battlefield at once, but these are real highlights, which is a bit disappointing. That being said, I probably would have played a huge amount of origins using exclusive Marine throwing knife and harpoon guns if I had the chance.
Speaking of side lining, I don’t actually miss stock management in previous games, but I feel that I didn’t remove the ability to pick up and use enemy weapons, especially the Green Beret. The discussion here is that Origins is always about thoughtful stealth, and not much about spraying lead from MP40s cleaned up to sw sw. Luckily, thoughtful stealth is empowered by the coolest part of Origins: command mode. Riff in a similar mode in the later stages, Great Mimimi’s Desperadus 3 and Shadow Gambit: Cursed Crew, Command Mode allows you to freeze each command’s time indefinitely and queue individual actions. In real time, they will do them simultaneously with your comments. Nailing timing in a series of command mode steps is powerfully satisfying, whether two crawl commands stab a towering pair of soldiers from the side, or a ballet of more complicated, elaborate choreographed harpoons, blades and bullets.
It’s a very slow process to do well, but when you understand the solution to incorporate what might seem like too many soldiers to work on, initially meticulously placed soldiers. Maybe your first target choice is impossible to kill quietly. Because he’s always watching one of his other peers, perhaps that very squadmate always considers a third of things, and so on. But it should be the first to fall on the Fairbain Six combat knife to reveal who should be the first domino. Some enemies leave posts to investigate strange sounds, such as sapper whistles and green beret radios, or inspect burning packets of driver cigarettes. Some people will only be temporarily spinning and facing distractions, and you will give them precious moments to slip through them. Experimenting which routes and tools work best is a task that utilizes obsessive parts of my brain.
Opportunities are always there. We are the only ones who find them – and the fact that they are not telegraphed or signed makes it feel like you’ve focused on the developers. At one point, I found a small gap in the cone of the scenery of four soldiers on top of a small staircase in the water. It allowed me to go behind them to wipe them out, as well as take a squad of three other people via boat behind my main purpose. Was it there on purpose? Probably not. I’ll leave that vague as to whether Claymore Game Studios secretly left Ajal, or if it left Ajal for us, or whether it succeeded in a sequence of unpredictable movements that we’ve never seen the Dev team come. In any case, the encouragement to explore every corner of the map for the best opportunity is completely burned down.
For the most part, these levels are all very detailed dioramas, and are vast and dense. And everyone feels like I’m playing a high stakes game of toy soldiers in a miniature map display that looks like I’m hiding behind a glass at the war museum. Missions are also taking place in Europe and North Africa, so the variety of backgrounds is fantastic, from snowy Scandinavia to lush fields and desert baking.
Additionally, the enormous environment is rendered completely in three dimensions, allowing you to enter the building seamlessly. It is also the fact that I felt it was necessary to give them the idea of how long it has been since there was a proper commando game. It’s easy to get to a right angle to find security gaps, as you can do fine camera rotations in the direction of the compass. That being said, scrolling too fast can bring a bit of temporary choppi, but that’s a short-lived complaint. Otherwise it looks good overall.
Unfortunately, there is sometimes clumsiness, especially when navigating complex, multi-storey structures. During the course of the campaign I encountered several enemies, which seemed to share the floor with me, but in reality it was on a completely different level and should have been hidden from sight at the moment. Also, I was not on the same platform that I wanted to leave it behind, so I felt unhappy with putting up an irreparable bear trap and ended up being shot through a solid container that was obviously never fun. Also, my orders were misinterpreted, and my men were departing in an unintended area and departing directly at the enemy’s gaze. Please think about it It’s clicking. However, these were not major complaints, and usually they had to pan the minor zoom and camera slightly. That, or a simple reload to get back someone who died early.
Save dyin’ privates
In the trial and error world of tactical games like Commandos, Quick Save is your friend. And Origins is no exception. The ability to pick up directly from where we left off after doing something risky or stupid actually gives us the freedom to experiment with different approaches in the first place. I’ve definitely saved it quickly and saved my bacon (and quickly!) on many occasions, but unfortunately this important feature seems to cause some of the most annoying bugs in Origin.
For example, if you load saves you create while one of the commandos is climbing a wire or sitting on a mountain-capable pole, you will see them as if they are uselessly raw or moonwalking, leaving behind a bastard that doesn’t show the poor bastard above the map. Naturally, the solution is simply to decide that you will never save one of your men while climbing up something. But that wasn’t the end of my problem. After another reload I realized that my Marines were no longer in his boat, but were walking on the water back to the marker I had placed. This bug ultimately solved itself, but not what my sapper simply disappeared from the map and became unselectable.
Such a problem could have broken the game, but the origins seem to recognize that there are some technical landmines for you to intervene, but maintain a queue of some quick saves. In most cases, if something goes wrong, you’re likely to have a slightly older save and you can even revert it. But in this example, I sadly filled all my saves without realizing that my sapper was no longer present. The only solution was to completely restart the mission. This was lost for over an hour.
Ranked among these World War II “Men on a Mission” movies
Ranked among these World War II “Men on a Mission” movies
It’s one strange problem, and I don’t know if it’s related to Quick Save, but sometimes the enemy accidentally detects one of your commands in a bush that isn’t hidden and is trapped in an alert state about it. They circle it afterwards and blow it up into hell. By stabbing all the soldiers when they were busy massacring the unfortunate plantings, I was able to skirt around it or make full use of it completely, so it wasn’t too bad, but it was definitely not supposed to happen.
I don’t necessarily call my enemies smartly overall. It would have been good if they had shown a little more of the initiatives seen in other modern stealth games. Instead of ruthlessly ignoring the corpses after resetting the alert phase, for example, they might want to drag their Caputo companions to a pre-defined location, Hatman. But they make up for dim light bulbs by being extremely dangerous – and when you think you understand their patterns, they are unpredictable enough to keep you on your toes. For example, you need to get a backup plan because you don’t inspect the closest hiding locations in the same order after reloading.
