Spit in Der Fuhrer’s Face
It’s late 1940, Hitler has taken over most of Europe. France has just fallen in
an epic battle that lasted three days (So they’re lovers, not fighters). Hitler
has now turned his attention to Britain, and the blitz begins. As a last effort,
the Prime Minister authorizes the use of a new squad of troops, the Commandos.
Six soldiers, each specially trained for different tasks, are sent to infiltrate
Fortress Europe and cause confusion among enemy soldiers. Is the team up to the
task, or will it simply become a footnote in history. As their commanding officer,
it’s up to you to see if they make it. Good luck!
Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines is a squad based real-time strategy game. You control a maximum of six commandos, and have to complete various missions within Hitler’s Europe. While the vast majority of the missions involve blowing up one thing or another, it’s not as simple as that. You have to quietly and systematically remove the enemy guards surrounding the base in order to accomplish your directive. Any mistake, be it a loud noise or being spotted by enemy patrols, puts the mission and your commandos in jeopardy. This game isn’t just a walk in the park.
Commandos is one game that you won’t need any new and fancy game hardware to run. The graphics are totally two dimensional. With well textured backgrounds and detailed sprite animations, this game shows that polygons aren’t necessary to make a good game. On top of that, the FMV is marvelous. Mostly taken from old propaganda films and old World War II footage, Commandos does an excellent job immersing you in the early part of the war.
As stated before, you have six different commandos under your direction. Most
levels won’t involve all six, and you are generally only given the minimum supplies
needed to finish the level. Your six commandos are: a soldier (basic tough guy),
a sniper (with an excellent sniping rifle, but not that many bullets), a diver
(expert in the water), a saboteur (makes things go boom), a driver (can operate
any vehicle), and a spy (likes to play dress up). Each commando has special
abilities that the others don’t have. For example, only the soldier and the
spy can carry dead bodies, but neither can go into the water without the diver’s
help. Winning each mission requires you to use each soldiers abilities to their
maximum.
Commandos wouldn’t be the great game that it is without the flawless
level design. Each level is a complex puzzle that the player has to grapple
with. Don’t expect it to start out easy; each level will take you at least an
hour to figure out and beat, and that’s if you’re lucky. For example, in order
to blow up an enemy dam, you have to get your spy into the enemy camp, but first
he needs an enemy outfit. You have to use your diver to steal a boat, kill all
the guards watching the water, and escort your spy down to a clothesline where
an officer’s uniform is waiting. You then have to send the spy into the enemy
camp, turn off the electrified fence, and distract the guards while the rest
of your crew sneaks in. Then you steal the explosives from the base using your
saboteur, place one at the base of a machine gun nest, and run away before the
bomb detonates and an alarm goes off. Only then can you place the bomb at the
base of the dam and drive off in a blaze of glory. Amazingly enough, that’s
just the third mission.
The sound in the game is a little
annoying, but necessary. Each commando makes a noise when you click on them,
when you move them, and when they get to their destination. You can turn off
the voice, but then you’ll find yourself ordering a soldier to his death by
mistake. The music is nonexistent, at least during the game. Only during mission
briefings and when you pause do classic military drum beats invade your speakers.
While playing the game noise is a factor, so the designers cleverly decided
not to use music. It is a stealth game after all . . .
With all this good, there has to be some bad. Some enemy reactions are unfortunately
unrealistic. For some reason, even if you blow up an enemy HQ, the soldiers
inside don’t die and instead swarm out of the building to kill your men. Also,
enemy soldiers are too quick to disregard a fallen comrade, always forgetting
to sound the alarm fast enough. While the latter is necessary to facilitate
gameplay, the former is just ridiculous.
Another problem lies with the multiplayer in Commandos. The multiplayer
allows you to play any mission and assign each commando to a different person.
Though an excellent idea, the lag is a little to rough to get used to. Also, it
would have been nice to have specifically designed multiplayer missions on top
of the single player ones. On top of that, you can only play multiplayer over
the internet through Mplayer, which, while free, just isn’t as good as Eidos setting
up their own multiplayer servers (ie BattleNet for StarCraft
and Bungie.net for Myth). The designers just didn’t put
much effort into the design of the multiplayer game.
All in all, Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines is one of the best strategy
games to be released in awhile. More than just a Dune
2 clone, Commandos provides the player with one of the toughest challenges
ever offered in a PC game. While more and more games are the kind that you can
solve in 10 hours, it’s good to see a game that will take about 60 hours, if
not 100. Now get out there and teach those Nazi’s a lesson.
