Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

Commandos Strike Force

1. Official Site
2. Platform: Xbox
3. Publisher: Eidos Interactive
4. Developer: Pyro Studios
5. Release Date: 04/04/06
6. Genre: Action/Adventure

by Mitch Youngblood

The original Commandos came out for the PC when I was a senior in college. Fortunately for my parents, the Internet was no where near as impossible to live without as it is today so I was without my own computer. My roommate, on the other hand, had one that worked just fine. One day he stormed out of his room on the verge of screaming from frustration and I asked why he was so pissed.

"It’s this *^%*$**@*@*$E*#@*$*#*$ game," he vented at me. Having never heard of it I asked to see it. He showed me the tutorial and I quickly picked up how to use the individual skills of the different commandos to achieve complete victory over the Nazis. He then mentioned that this was the expansion pack and that he couldn’t figure out this one mission. When he showed it to me I about fell out of my chair at the sheer enormity of it. It was a mission that involved the spy trying to get to an enemy officer’s uniform hung neatly on a clothesline. The trick being the clothesline was on the roof of a mansion surrounded by an entire legion of German soldiers, and once I picked up the uniform the mission really started getting interesting. It took me three entire days to crack that nut and it remains in my top 10 proudest gaming achievements.

That was both the beauty and anguish of the Commandos series: Unparalleled difficulty in a demanding environment all set in levels that made you want to watch The Great Escape and Where Eagles Dare. Pyro Studios has once again stepped up to the plate with the next installment and this time they took a different approach. Commandos Strike Force is all about first-person perspective action and while this may needle fans of the original top-down approach they can rest assured the feel is well captured. Thankfully the difficulty has been brought down to manageable levels as well either through accident or design.

It may be the conspiracy theorist in me but I’ve recently noticed a marked decline in the graphics of current-generation systems. My thinking on this is that with the next-generation already here with more on the way, developers have decided to shift resources to focus on the new consoles while neglecting their current brethren. With the Xbox 360 out and the PS3 and Revolution en route to the party, why allocate every resource you have to the current generation of toys when the Powers That Be want to sell all the bright, shiny new toys?

This makes perfect sense when carefully examining how flora and fauna in Commandos Strike Force look like large bitmaps stretched over branches with the intent of imitating trees. Or illustrating how graphics looked 10 years ago. Either way. I wasn’t quite sure because after a while I stopped staring at how ugly the backgrounds were and started focusing on the handsomely designed European villages.

To jump games for a second, let me state that the only inspired map in the entirety of Return to Castle Wolfenstein was when your mission was to assassinate five generals in a small town while remaining undetected. It felt like I was the star of The Guns of Navarone and it really captured the feeling of those classic World War II films. Commandos Strike Force does just that only a little clunkier.

If you can get past the graphics looking like they belong to a first-gen Xbox game complete with blocky character movements and excessive clipping, and just enjoy the level design then you’re in for a treat. Small back alleys, cobbled streets, and small houses practically built on top of one another are everywhere. If not for the whole war thing going on it’s believable imagining having a coffee at a local café. Credit goes to Spain-based Pyro Studios for the authentic feel of the small towns and landscapes of the game. It’s too bad they couldn’t bring the visuals up to current standards, but perhaps they were rushed and/or short on budget.

Someone at Pyro needs to take a course in how to integrate sound effects because the ones in Commandos Strike Force are weak. Not only are they weak, but they all sound the same regardless of how close you are to the source. For example, listen to the rumbling of a truck as it drives up and then drives away. Reload your game and listen to it while you’re down an alley near by and it sounds like you’re standing next to it. The gunfire also sounds like a bunch of pop guns going off in the neighbor’s backyard with the exception being the sniper rifle.

As a result, every time I’d assault the German position I would laugh at their feeble attempts to stop the commandos. Then I’d whip out the sniper rifle, squeeze off a shot, and worry that I’d just capped the paperboy from down the street.

I’m convinced that somewhere in the rule book for making a World War II game (and this reviewer’s money is on the Top Five) there must be a rules stating all relevant music to said product must be orchestral bombast that uplifts, inspires, and gets the blood pumping. Just about every WWII shooter ever invented has crossed my desk at one point or another and by this point the soundtracks all run together. That’s a long winded way of suggesting diversity to developers of this particular genre.

It’s surprising to find such clunky controls for a game that depends so heavily on precision timing. Walking up or down stairwells should feel smooth yet players will frequently curse the Frankenstein-esque way in which they stagger up or down stair wells. The normal controls would never be confused for the smoothest control scheme in the world but this feels like it needed several more weeks worth of tweaking. It doesn’t help watching enemy soldiers visibly clipping through stairs because it feels like a cheat. They can walk right through walls with no problem yet the heroes have trouble? Was clipping not an option for the Allies or did I miss something?

The recommendation of this review is that gamers who play this read the instructions. While that may be considered heresy then let me describe how the Spy changes clothes. Sneaking up behind an enemy unnoticed will let you hit the A button to trigger a stealth kill. Once the enemy has been taken out the Spy can then examine the body and take the uniform by again hitting the A button. You then must hit the up arrow on the directional pad until you see an image what sort of looks like clothing in the bottom right corner of the screen. Once this is selected you have to pull the left trigger to activate the uniform change. Be careful though as doing this in the heat of combat can lead one to scroll right past the uniform and select the poison gas canister which is deadly to you unless you’re wearing a gas mask. Guess where that one is selected from?

The sub-menus for selecting weapons come from hitting down on the directional button. Pulling the right trigger naturally fires your weapon of choice but the left trigger does play another role. If you have a distraction queued up then pulling the left trigger will throw it. There is no way this will not confuse people initially and that’s killer for something that should have been an easy design decision. After all, the B button is just the Back button in the menu screens and is otherwise useless through the rest of the game. The Y button is jump, the X button is reload, the white button uses the medkit and the black button cycles through the other commandos whenever that option is available.

The best way to describe Commandos Strike Force is to imagine Garrett of Thief-infamy attacking the Nazis primarily using stealth while occasionally having no other option than the brute force approach. What surprised me the most was the heavy emphasis on the Spy character and how you will find yourself sneaking through a village that you initially anticipated attacking head-on. The marketing lead me to believe this was primarily an action game and while those sequences certainly exist, the game remains true to the original series by making the player think before they act. Run-and-gun will get you killed quickly so be prepared to use the wait-and-see approach instead. There were plenty of times when I would wait for five or six minutes just watching troop movements.

Switching between each of the commandos is pretty fun initially but sometimes it can seem like more trouble than it's worth as you have to walk two or three of them through an entire map to get to the end. To spice things up a bit I would take the Spy over one route and then take either the Sniper or the Green Beret across a different path. Sometimes you need one soldier to clear an area so another (or both) can come in and finish the last half of the mission. But using the Sniper to clear a path and then the Spy to take out a Gestapo agent so I could take his clothes is a lot of fun. It seems like the only times I wasn’t having a lot of fun was during the Green Beret sequences but that may be because the Call of Duty series does that so well it’s nigh impossible to top.

Aside from the controls which, as noted, get in the way more times than not, the overall game remains both fun and challenging. It’s a thinking man’s approach to WWII combat which isn’t the most widely available thing on the market. Normally games set in this era focus on blasting Germans while backed up with deafening surround sound, but Commandos Strike Force makes you think about every decision you could make in any given situation. To its credit, it even gives players the freedom to approach missions however they may like. I want to put an asterix there because the free-form approach is more illusion than hard fact because while you can choose whether or not to take out the guards by the docks, the end result will still find your Sniper making his way up to a bell tower so the Spy can slip into town and sneak around. The end goal is never in doubt and your actions on a mission don’t come back to haunt you beyond the cinematic story sequences. Even those don’t mean much because when the story jumps all around Europe with no consistent plot (and no, "there’s a mole" doesn’t count as a story by itself) then it is hard to attach yourself to the characters. Awful dialogue badly delivered doesn’t help either.

Commandos Strike Force has exactly two things that extend the game’s life. The first is the art gallery which is unlocked through the completion of missions, and the second is an online mode that’s just so-so. You know, in actually typing that out loud (so to speak) I must have snapped out of some fog because that’s not exactly different than other games on the market. The artwork is neat to look at but I can’t see myself revisiting the game just to scroll through a WWII art gallery when I can Google the same thing and find better results. As for the online mode, it’s cool to finally have the commandos in the online world but standard deathmatch and team deathmatch are just that: Standard.

The variable is in the Sabotage mode where the Spies are the key to victory. Whenever an enemy soldier is killed they are briefly open to interrogation by the Spies who will extract part of a six-digit code but only if they aren’t interrupted. If the fallen is another Spy, then three digits of the full code can be obtained instead of the standard single digit but there’s another catch. It takes longer to interrogate a Spy than it does a normal soldier so players are advised to be sneaky and stealthy. I think the idea behind this is better than the execution, a flaw endemic to the entire game, but it still feels like an intriguing take on Assault/Capture the Flag.

There is a classic WWII game buried somewhere in Commandos Strike Force but it’s undone by the clunky interface, poor graphics, and simplistic enemy AI. So why is it still fun for the most part? Because if nothing else, Pyro Studios have some killer ideas for setups but fumble on the execution. Fans of the series know this is par for the course and it is bloody frustrating to feel so close to greatness yet be denied because of bad design decisions and the game’s unpolished nature. Pyro has a gem buried somewhere under this mass and my hope is that if they keep polishing it then someday it will be incredible. As it stands now, Commandos Strike Force is very rough but still fun for the most part. The advice of this reviewer is to do two things: Avoid high expectations, and rent.

Gaming Trend Score

79

1. Graphics: 76
2. Audio: 75
3. Controls: 76
4. Gameplay: 82
5. Value/Replay: 80
6. OVERALL:79