Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines

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Review: Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines

This fascinating World War II special-forces game keeps you well employed as commander of up to six Allied troopers on 24 missions in angled-down German territory. They typically end in golden, debris-laden explosions-here, you're blowing up a dam or a chateau, there a radar station or a giant artillery piece-but the means in this real-time strategy game is all bound up in stealth, timing, and teamwork.

The commandos share the ability to walk, run, crawl, climb ladders, and fire their standard-issue .45s, and two or three also know their way around a first-aid kit.

Beyond that, each has unique skills. The Green Beret is good with a knife, knows how to use camouflage and climb walls, and can carry heavy objects (including dead Germans). The sniper snipes. The Marine is comfortable on and under water. The demolitions expert also knows how to lay traps and handle grenades. The spy can impersonate Germans and administer poison, and the driver can pilot enemy vehicles and is adept with a burp gun.

Using that gun may be risky. Hell, everything's risky in Commandos. Moving around without intimate knowledge of your surroundings, leaving behind footprints in the snow, or taking down a sentry has the potential to attract attention. (Each enemy has a roving field of vision, represented by a transparent green overlay.) Avoiding detection is a delicate art-if even one commando dies, you'll have to restart the level or restore a save-and this makes the game at once repetitive and deliciously addictive.

The artwork helps (lots of rich browns and greens), and so does the AI. The enemy troops are both unexpectedly cleverand unexpectedly moronic. For instance, a few missions in, I sent two men-one with a bear trap, the other with an audible decoy-to ensnare the guards around a chateau targeted for destruction. Much to my surprise, I managed to nail five or six of them, using those items repeatedly in the same locations, before the Germans finally figured it out and opened fire on the decoy.

Moreover, the game doesn't have much sense of degree. The Germans always seem to spot your men when they're visible and within range, and their fire is resolutely on-target. The skills of the commandos are absolutes; the game draws no distinctions between different levels of competency. This makes sense with skills that require detailed technical knowledge-demolition, for instance-but seems silly for more general abilities like rowing a boat or throwing grenades.

And it was ultimately that rigidity-along with the significant level of personal control each commando requires (via either icons or hotkeys)-that had me feeling as though I'd signed up for a job saving and loading, saving and loading. A more role-playing approach, in which mundane tasks could be performed by any commando (but more efficiently by experts), would have been less frustrating.

The cooperative multiplayer game for two to six was a question mark: It's designed only for LAN play (to which I didn't have access) and Mplayer (which didn't have the game running at press time).

But the single-player game of Commandos is a regular hoot (hoot quietly, though); and while I've lost patience with the saving and loading, I haven't stopped punching the clock. Don't wait up. I'm working late.-- Peter Olafson / GamePro