Hands-On Review--Commandos Battle Pack

Frequent readers know that we enjoy (maybe too much) playing first person shooter 3D games on line in multiplayer format, especially war games. Our favorite remains Call of Duty followed by Medal of Honor and Battlefield 1942. However, there is another genre called strategy games, like Myth and its subsequent derivatives and the currently very popular Warcraft. Commandos Battle Pack was brought to the Mac by the British gamehouse Feral Interactive. The Pack consists of two games, Commandos 2 and Commados 3. They were developed by Pyro Studios and published by Eidos Interactive. The Commandos games are strategy games.

To be honest, and to show our bias, we have found strategy games to be less exciting than first person shooters. They take more time to learn and play and require different skills than first person shooters. Of course, that is exactly what many people like. Strategy games require real dedication and their adherents refer to first person shooters as the "junk food" of computer games. That's probably a fair comparison. A further benefit of strategy games in a multiplayer setting is that "older" players have to worry less about frequently losing to "younger" players simply due to their usually quicker reaction times.

Being first person shooter junkies we tried to just drop into the Stalingrad map of Commandos 3 (above) to try out the game without even reading the supplied manual. No go. Too much to learn. We couldn't even solve the first challenge of taking out a sniper after several hours of trying. Okay, to do this review justice we had to read the manual, watch Feral's on line walkthough in Flash and memorize the keyboard shortcuts. Then, we started at Training Camp 1 in Commandos 2 (left) instead of starting out on an advanced map.

Getting prepared made a huge difference. We actually felt that we could control and play the game. Well, not just yet. One more lesson had to be learned and it is the toughest--timing. One can't just go through the motions of completing the tasks and move on to the next level. It took us a few times for just the second task to get the timing down to take out the second soldier without getting spotted and shot. The same with other tasks, even in the first map. Commandos is no pushover. However, once we got the key/mouse commands down and the timing down for each task we were able to get through the Training Camp 1 map fairly easily but it was a significant challenge to get to that level of capability.

To play Commandos, one is provided with a squad of commandos, each with different skills and capabilities. At first, one has just a sapper and a thief but one gains the others (diver, green beret, sniper and spy) as one plays through the levels. Your job is to lead these commandos through a series of maps and accomplish complex tasks to complete missions from the World War II European Theater to the Pacific Theater. There are multiple ways to complete each mission in the later levels. The ability to move a map's cameras to show the map from different perspectives allows one to plan and execute the tasks and complete the mission.

The maps in Commandos are very interesting. Several of the maps involve aircraft, trains, ships and submarines as well as cities, camps, islands, beaches and jungles. The graphics are excellent, especially the soldier models that run, crawl, shoot, use fists, use keys, use mine detectors, defuse mines, place mines, climb poles, swing along lines, tie up enemy soldiers, carry the enemy to new locations, etc. In other words, they do a lot more than just the run, jump and shoot models in first person shooters. The maximum video resolution supported is 1024x768 at millions of colors in Commandos 2 and 800x600 at millions of colors in Commandos 3 but the graphics definition is still surprisingly excellent.

While we have tackled only the single player mode to date, Commandos provides multiplayer combat. One can engage in combat with up to 8 other players on a local network or over the internet.

Commandos is a very complex and challenging game. Once its basic skills are learned, Commandos is a joy to play. It's complexity yields enthralling challenges that stir up enthusiasm to continue trying to accomplish a mission if not one way then another. If one enjoys strategy games or war games, Commandos Battle Pack will be very satisfying. If not, try it out anyway--you may just get captured like we did. Commandos Battle Pack by Feral Interactive is $39.99 from Amazon.com. Feral Interactive requires the disc to be in one's optical drive to play the game as their piracy protection scheme. Now back to take out that sniper in Stalingrad.... [Bill Fox]