derekr's Full Review: Commandos: Beyond The Call of Duty for Windows
I recently saw Commandos:Beyond the Call of Duty in the store, and it looked like a must buy. It turned out to be a bust.
Real time strategy games are something I enjoy playing on a regular basis. A good game needs to be challenging, yet entertaining. It also needs to keep you interested when you play. While playing this game, I found my self spending hours trying to kill one soldier without 20 other Germans opening fire. I think this is the first strategy game that has frustrated me to a point where I did not want to play the game anymore.
Commandos:Beyond the Call of Duty has a great background to the game, and I like the idea of having different characters with different abilities. The Green Beret is your most used character. He is your strong man, who can move large objects, sneak up and kill enemies, and setup decoys to attract enemy soldiers. The Sapper is your explosives expert. He can plant explosives for objects and set a bear trap to catch unsuspecting soldiers. The Sniper is your long range soldier. He is used to take out victims from long ranges without being noticed. He also carries the medical kit to treat any wounded team members. Fins is your Navy seal. He will drive the inflatable raft, he can swim in the water using an air tank, and he has a harpoon (a very good short range weapon because it is quiet). The Driver is responsible for taking vehicles to transport the team members. He carries a rifle and a submachine gun. Your six member is the Spy. He can sneak up on enemy soldiers and take their uniforms so that he can blend in with the Germans. He uses his Chloroform or lethal injection to disable the enemy.
There are 8 missions in the game. Each mission starts with a brief overview of your objectives, and then your on your own. I will describe mostly from the first mission, because this is the ONLY mission I could complete. Still not convinced by that statement that the game is next to impossible??? How about the fact that I went to EIDOS website, looked at their strategy guide, and still could not solve the missions. The strategy guide tells you who to kill, what to do to kill them, etc. The problem is, you have to be in the EXACT position to be able to do this, and I mean exact. If your soldier is 2 pixels out of place, he gets spotted and killed.
This was the problem I found with the game. When you start the first mission, you are in the middle of the ocean. You can scroll around and see the island that you must go to, and you can see the Germans patrolling their fortress. NOW WHAT?? I started moving my boat, and alarms went off, and I had 4 dead Germans!! OK, after a few minutes, I figured out that I guy in the tower spotted me. Once I took him out with my sniper, I could go bit farther, before others spotted me. This process went on for several hours, and this is when I consulted the cheats.
The characters carry a variety of objects, like stones and cigarettes to distract soldiers, if they capture a soldier, they can put him under their control. This game requires you to be VERY PRECISE to reach your objective. Using the cheats, it took me about 10 hours over a few days to complete the first mission. I went on to the second mission, and it is even more impossible. And from this mission I learned....that even their strategy guide is wrong in some areas, and will not help you.
I got to look at all the other missions by using a cheat code to skip missions, and found that each one gets incredibly harder. After about a month of owning the game, I gave it to my brother-in-law. I have never played a strategy game and given up on it, until I played this game. Maybe it is because I did not play any other of the Commandos games, but I would not be willing to by any more of these games.
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