Commandos Origins review - RTS gaming at its most intense

Whether it’s Metal Gear Solid, Splinter Cell, Assassin’s Creed, Thief, or any other genre titan, stealth games all suffer owing to the same paradox – a tension between what they’re meant to be in theory versus what they actually are in practice. You’re the world’s greatest secret agent. You’re a superhuman hitman. With instinct, intellect, athleticism, and cutting-edge equipment, you can infiltrate even the most securely guarded enemy bases, complete your objectives, and get back out without anybody knowing you were there. That’s the pretence. The reality is an abortive clash of trial and error. You quick save. You try something. The alarm goes off. You get killed. You quick load. You try something else. The alarm goes off. And so on.

The characters in stealth games are supposed to be efficient and graceful, but the structure and mechanics of these games mean that any moments of real elegance or sophistication are rare, and usually follow several minutes of clumsy experimentation. RTS game series after 22 years (not counting the remasters, or unloved FPS spin-off Strike Force) is unfortunately no different. But it’s still good, and while it strains against the principles of stealth games, it’s a great showcase of low-scale, high-stakes strategy.

It’s the early days of World War 2 and the famous Commandos unit is not yet fully assembled. You begin the with only the Green Beret and, throughout the 20-hour-plus campaign, you’re gradually ed by the Sapper, the Sniper, the Marine, the Spy, and the Driver. Each has different abilities – the Sapper can cut through barbed wire; the Marine can swim underwater; the Spy has a silenced Luger – and by combining them you sneakily complete sabotage missions deep behind the German lines. Compared to the older Commandos trilogy, particularly the first game, the pace in Origins is much slower. Including retries and quick loading, each level will take you between two and three hours – the maps are gigantic, and there are so many enemies that you have to carefully plan and execute every forward step.

It’s a fantastic moment when you first begin a mission, and zoom out to see just how many soldiers and sentries stand between you and your objective. Initially, it all looks impossible. There’s an early level where you have to infiltrate and blow up a fort, and every single route of ingress is covered by enemy patrols, fixed machine guns, and gated checkpoints. You only have two men – the Green Beret and the Sniper – and a supremely limited amount of ammunition. And yet, two hours later, you can zoom back out and see dozens of Nazis either dead or unconscious and the fort in ruins. Somehow you did it. But Commandos Origins is also gratifying in the moment to moment.

While levels last hours, they’re informally separated into dozens of smaller challenges. Every courtyard you have to cross, building you have to infiltrate, and power line you have to sabotage represents a mini strategy game in and of itself. Beyond the initial tutorial level and a couple of tooltips, you’re on your own – you can hit Tab to get a highlighted overlay of possible points of intrigue, but these are deliberately vague, and Commandos Origins encourages you to use your own cunning and intellect. This is the game’s rhythm. You enter a new area, apprehend how many guards there are and the possible routes in and out, and start probing. It might look impenetrable – the guards all cross paths, their sight lines intersect, and there’s too much open ground.

But once you start to experiment – hit quick save and see if you can successfully crawl into that pile of canvas before anybody turns and spots you; stick a knife in one of the guards and try to drag his body back indoors before his friend comes back – a plan will begin to form. Playing Commandos Origins is like chipping away at a solid piece of marble and turning it into a sculpture. You start with this rock-hard, inscrutable, monolithic block of a level, but by chiseling here and brushing there, after a few hours, you can look back and see what you’ve created – or, more often, blown up.

The spirit of Commandos Origins is contained within its Command mechanic. You hit Shift and the game freezes. You then assign separate orders to each one of your men – tell the Green Beret to put a chokehold on the nearest guard, the Marine to distract a would-be onlooker by throwing a pebble, the Spy to eliminate him using his silenced rifle – and unfreeze. Now, everyone is poised. When you hit Enter, they will perform all of these actions in synchrony; get it right, and it feels almost musical or balletic, but with a thick strain of brutality. That pebble hits the ground. The guard turns away. His friend yelps and slumps over. A whispered gunshot. Another thump. And it’s all over, in seconds.

Reaching the end of a mission almost feels besides the point. The thrust of the Commandos Origins is in failing and retrying, failing and retrying, failing and retrying until you can execute the perfect tactical maneuver. It’s taken you maybe 30 minutes of real time, but you’ve gotten from one side of the courtyard to the other, and you’ve eliminated all the guards, and nobody saw a thing.

It’s an RTS game at the smallest scale. In Command and Conquer and StarCraft, after half an hour you’ve built an entire base, fielded a battalion of tanks, and defeated an entire army. In Commandos Origins, you’ve crossed the street. It’s both meticulous and exhilarating, but it can also feel too slow and too precise. Quite often, rather than calculating some brilliant, bold, tactical masterstroke, you’re just butting up against the game’s fussy systems. The difference between triggering an alarm and remaining unseen might be a might be a millimetre of a guard’s vision cone. When you try to tell one commando to flank right, the other to go left, you might send them both running in the same direction because you’ve not correctly configured the game’s exacting menu.

A lot of your quick loads are the product of accidental quirks in your soldiers’ behavior, or the unbendable, mechanical routines of the enemies. The original Metal Gear Solid remains the greatest stealth game not only because of its style, its aesthetic, and its performances, but the simplicity of its systems: guards walk in predictable routes, they have clear sight lines, and it’s all eminently visible on the Soliton radar. Commandos Origins is more than a stealth game – it’s a tactics game – but at its worst it feels overdesigned, and like the abundance of mechanics squeezes out improvisation or raw energy.

It is a problem with the genre – Commandos Origins is made in the spirit of men-on-a-mission war movies and Boys’ Own adventures, but the conventions of stealth games and, to a lesser extent, strategy games, mean that it often feels more like an exercise in deconstruction, systems logic, and patience. It’s a great setup – it always has been – but the actual experience of Commandos is stiff and inorganic. It doesn’t capture the energy of the premise. It’s more like your stubbornness versus the spreadsheets that contain the game’s programming.

But make peace with that – and also the fact that the gorgeous, click-clack backpack menu system from the old games has been replaced with a banal (though ittedly more readable) set of icons – and Commandos Origins is still good. No matter how transparent the systems are and how much over-particular quick saving and quick loading you have to do, it’s a very hard game to put down, and it successfully makes even the smallest actions feel significant, even meaningful.