You spend a lot of time—a lot of, given the current state of the world, cathartic time—stabbing, shooting, and blowing up Nazis in Commandos: Origins. From a top-down perspective, you issue orders to a half-dozen World War II soldiers, each one specialized in disciplines like sniping or explosives. The encampments your commandos must infiltrate are sprawling, each minimap splattered with red dots that signify the droves of enemies capable of sounding the alarm. The game’s single most difficult obstacle, though, is the fundamental imprecision of your elite commandos when they fumble to carry out your orders.
Imprecision is death to the subgenre of real-time stealth tactics, where a perpetual ticking clock reminds you to quicksave so that you can try again when things inevitably go sideways. These games aren’t about getting things right the first time but getting them right eventually. Because all the failures contribute to the eventual relief of a mission accomplished.
But given the degree to which failures accumulate, they need to feel like your own, such as a detail you overlooked. Each one prompts you to tweak your strategy and try again. The now-defunct Mimimi Games modernized and mastered this style with games like Desperados III and the more experimental Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew. But when those failures feel more like a deficiency of the aiming system or an outright glitch, they become infuriating.
Unlike Mimimi’s work, Commandos: Origins hasn’t been polished to a mirror shine. Lines of sight for firearms and trajectory arcs for thrown objects are unreliable at best, often blocked by the edge of the scenery. It’s not uncommon for your commandos to reposition themselves in order to carry out an order only for them to blunder into the edge of a vision cone or crawl right up to the enemy’s boots. Other times, enemies might suddenly start patrolling differently when you reload a save, or they might trigger an alarm despite never spotting you.
Now, an alarm isn’t the end of the world, as many of your objectives involve blowing up key installations that put the whole place on high alert. But the fiddly aiming ensures that anything short of knifing a Nazi from the bushes is unreliable at best. So many of your actions—even something as seemingly foolproof as firing the main gun of a tank—ask for a precision that Commandos: Origins only sometimes nails. Your sniper can shoot two enemies at once, with a bullet capable of passing through one body and hitting a second, but if the sniper repositions himself ever so slightly to take the shot (and he often does), the whole plan goes to pieces.
And in the face of such imprecision, you can’t put much faith in what is otherwise the crown jewel of stealth tactics: the ability to queue up actions between multiple characters and trigger them all simultaneously. There’s no guarantee that the timing is going to line up for anything but the most basic maneuvers, like two commandos rushing two Nazis at the same time. For as big and ambitious as its levels may be, the most reliable way to progress in Commandos: Origins is a tedious process of luring each guard to his doom, one at a time.
This game was reviewed with a code provided by Kalypso Media Group GmbH.
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Hey Steven, I asked about the repositions to the developers on the Steam community discussions, based on your review. I hope they answer. Thanks for your work on the review.