The classic Commandos series was all about cleverly commanding a squad to pull off some daring operations aimed at crippling the Nazi war machine and putting a real stick in the eye of the empire. But it’s also a series that’s been in relative dormancy for some time, leaving other games like Shadow Tactics and Desperados to pick up the torch and offer a similar blend of real-time strategy and stealth gameplay that’s all about pulling off some slick, decisive strategies.
With the upcoming Commandos: Origins from developer Claymore Game Studios, the series finally gets its long overdue successor following the 2006 FPS spin-off, marking a return to the original’s old-school perspective and brutal difficulty. I recently got to play the opening missions of Commandos: Origins and came away appreciating this revival of an open-ended tactical stealth-action game – even if it took me some time to come to grips with it.
As a return to the classic gameplay and storytelling of the early PC games in the series, Commandos: Origins appropriately focuses on the founding of the elite squad. As green beret Jack O’Hara, he’s recruited by commando Sergeant Hancock with a mission to strike back against the growing Nazi empire. Following a daring escape through a North African allied base overrun by the Axis army, the duo soon expands their crew to engage in a larger campaign to destroy key targets across Europe and even the Arctic regions.
Commandos: Origins works has both a modern update to the classic formula of the series, but also as a jumping on point for those who’ve never played the originals. Much like the previous games, Origins taps into the style of pulpy, ensemble action films in the vein of The Guns of Navarone or The Dirty Dozen for its campaign. The core gameplay is a blend of real-time strategy and a carefully paced tactics game, where you command a small squad to sneak through bases, take out targets, and make it out alive. Instead of moving turns like other tactics games, your squad and all enemies on the field will move and react in real-time, which pushes you to make your moves count – or else face the onslaught of enemies on the field.
Speaking to art director Thilo Gebhardt from Claymore Game Studios, he explained how the developer was specifically founded to help revive the Commandos series and how they approached modernizing it for Origins.
“The original owner of Kalypso Media, Simon Hellwig, who passed away, had the idea to bring back Commandos – he was a big fan of the original games,” Gebhardt said. “He had the opportunity to acquire it, and once he decided to make the next game an in-house production, he founded Claymore Studios specifically to revisit the brand. […] With other competitors in the genre recently they’ve shown that this type of game can still be updated to a more modern standard because it can be a hardcore experience. But we’ve also found ways to improve the interface and the pacing, and we hope to have made that experience more modern and less frustrating for new players.”
With each mission giving you a list of objectives and a large map to explore, you’re tasked with completing them efficiently and carefully. By taking advantage of blindspots in enemy line of sight and patrol patterns and using gadgets from the key members of each squad, you’re given plenty of opportunities and a wide berth in how you clear a mission. In some ways, it felt like each stage was a puzzle box to solve – by way of a stealth-action tactics game, and I soon had to get comfortable with hiding guards after I had taken them out of commission.
The opening mission in North Africa served as a solid tutorial in showcasing just how versatile but still specialized the squad members were. For instance, Sergeant Hancock takes on the role of the combat sapper, a combat engineer who can cut through wire barricades and plant powerful explosives to blow up targets. I found a lot to appreciate with how each squad member can coordinate, particularly with pulling off O’Hara’s advanced traversal skills and quick stealth attacks to help clear the way for his allies to break the objectives.
The stealth mechanics are impressive and really show a level of depth with the enemy AI and level design – particularly with how guards will remember which allies are in the area and how snowprints are visible in places that shouldn’t be. While I mostly crawled through the stages to be on the safe side, I still appreciated the moments when I could get a solid jump on the enemy. One useful option is the command mode, which lets you plan out specific moves for multiple squad members to execute all at once. Following the opening mission, Commandos immediately put me to the test in the following mission, which chucked me into the deep end.
Simply put, the difficulty here is super challenging. If just one commando dies, it’s a loss. I ended up failing – a lot – and that meant reloading saves to try again. Much like early entries, Commandos: Origins sticks with a retro style of progression in each mission – and that means you’ll need to embrace the retro concept of manually saving often – as auto-saves are not present in missions. In one instance during the second operation, I reached an important section of the stage but was quickly gunned down by patrolling troops. Because I was so focused on maneuvering my crew, I had forgotten to save and lost close to 10 minutes of progress.
According to the developers, the classic approach to manual saving was intentional, as it sticks close to the experience of the original games and doesn’t seek to give players too many safety nets.
“We thought a lot about the fans of the original games, and for them, the aspect of how saving works was something you simply shouldn’t change, it really comes down to taking away the liberty to decide on your own how you want to save your progress and what risk you want to take,” the art director Gebhardt said. “Personally, I will save a lot, and there are some more daring and more experienced players who deliberately do not save. And they approach it like a little bit of a puzzle with a more creative way. So really for Commandos, it’s about creative freedom of selecting your own safe points for.”
My losses regularly felt crushing, especially considering just how lengthy missions can be. I often felt the need to take a break, but I still rallied and came through. These repeats, in some cases, turned out to be a blessing, as they allowed me to go through the trial-and-error process and pick up new strategies, sometimes allowing me to satisfyingly make the best of a clumsy situation.
In one mission, I had to destroy a guarded comms tower. I originally took out all guards in the area and then destroyed the tower, but upon a redo of the area, I simply destroyed the tower and watched it crash down on two guards, with me walking away feeling like I was Agent 47 in Hitman. In one satisfying instance, I used my sniper commando to pull off a Saving Private Ryan-style series of quick sniper shots on alerted guards, giving my team some breathing room to rally.
The raw satisfaction that comes from tactics games is seeing a plan come together after taking a risk, and Commandos: Origins certainly offered up plenty of those moments – even after my crushing defeats. So far, Claymore Game Studios’ revival of Commandos is offering a compelling case for its comeback, which can potentially put the series back on the map as an exciting and satisfying tactics game.
