(Especially “1” to select Green Beret, X for knife, H for hand). I’d recommend learning the hotkeys though to speed up all of the frantic clicking in the backpack. The game comes with tutorial videos, tutorial missions and is very easy to learn and play. Milli-seconds often felt like they mattered and were counted by the game. And most of all it was fast and real-time. You could split the screen into multiple viewports and have each viewport on a different part of the map, and even “attach” a viewport to a German solider so you could monitor people out of immediate eyesight of the main screen.
#COMMANDOS 1 MISSIONS FULL#
The maps were stuffed full of German soldiers and tanks etc, all moving about on their own patrol rotues, each with their own little vision cones ready to spot you and call “alarm! alarm!”. (I still remember the look of most of them, especially that last castle level). I remember the game technology was pretty remarkable at the time for 1998 as well: The maps were huge, they varied in local and importantly were beautifully detailed. But it’s often so much more easy and satisfying to stab a few lone sentries and haul their bodies away in an effort to reduce the number of eyeballs that might spot your stealthing agents. You don’t have to kill anyone and everyone – some missions can be done entirely without contact with the enemy if you’re one of those insane speed runners I see on youtube. Your goal as the commander is to use the Commandos and their special skills to complete the main mission objective, which is usually blowing up a certain building inside a heavily fortified Germany base, or killing an important General before he flees in the car, etc.
#COMMANDOS 1 MISSIONS DRIVER#
The Driver is the only one that can drive cars and is American so therefore has a machine gun. The spy can dress up in enemy clothing and walk amongst the enemy unseen. The Marine has scuba gear, a harpoon gun and can drive the inflatable boat. The sniper has a long ranged weapon, for sniping people with. The sapper carries all of the major explosives, grenades and traps. The Green Beret is all about heft: He can climb walls, stab people, carry bodies to hide them away and leave some little distraction box (so he can then stab people looking at it). In each mission you control a handful of “Commandos” characters via pointing and clicking, each commandos has a variety of special skills uniqe to themselves (kind of like the A-Team). The game is a point and click real-time sort of game.
It’s such a unique sort of game that I even consider two games, Robin Hood and Desperados, as “Commandos Clones”. I’d definitely consider it a “unique” game, even if there are a lot of “stealth games” out there. Or even a small-scale-squad-based-nazi-stabbing-sim, or something. If you’ve never played Commandos before, I’d call it a real-time-puzzler. So now it’s time to find out if anyone can play Commandos 1 without any cheats as well. (I think I had to ‘cheat’ in order to find some bonus mission or something) I think I did nothing but play that game from release until completion, ignoring everything else in life until it was done. I do remember Commandos 2 was one of my most eagerly awaited games, and I was definitely glad to play it. I think my friend had it, but I only played a demo. I can barely remember the expansion, Beyond the Call of Duty.
(Or better: get more than one star on a mission). I had no idea if those later levels were even possible, or what kind of crazy person existed that could actually run through the vision cones and stab their way to their mission objectives without setting off the alarms. Infact I don’t think I actually completed it – I did at most a 1/3rd of it, and then used cheats to skip through each subsequent mission, each one looking even more impossible than the last. I distinctly remember my school friends and I all owning/playing the game when it was released and loving it (though strangely I don’t remember trying multiplayer – I suspect we didn’t all have the internet back then or something), but finding it extremely difficult. I soon found Commandos shooting to the top of the “fave games list”! And rightly so, as everytime I think about Commandos I think “corr, what a game! They don’t make them like that anymore”. So special that I’d completely forgotten that the games existed until I made a small “game ranking” program that allowed me to compared a bunch of games against each other and allowed me to pick the best out of the 2 being compared, then sorted them in a big list accordingly.
#COMMANDOS 1 MISSIONS SERIES#
The Commandos series holds a special place in my heart.