Gaming Target - PlayStation 2: Commandos 2: Men of Courage

Written by Chris Reiter on September 16, 2002

Full Review: Think you're ready to think of thinking that you'll be thinking after you've been thinking a lot? You thought right!

Of the majority of strategy games released on home consoles throughout game history, most were not all that great. With the exception of maybe a few titles, you have to think that the strategy genre has never really thrived distant from its PC roots, but there are those developers who see things differently. Pyro Studios is one of them. Teamed up with Eidos Interactive, Pyro has now brought forth onto unsuspecting PlayStation 2 owners a sequel to one of the more popular PC strategy hits from a year past that focuses on the World War II era, in a game that is undoubtedly made for the hardcore PC lover of the original.

Today is your lucky day. Outside is a war to be won. You will face Nazi resistance, bullets flying to the left and right of you, and maybe you'll find yourself drowning in your own waste in some gory fashion. But listen, that's only the good news! Your job isn't to die: it's to live. Play your part as Sergeant УTinyФ McHale, and command a team of men and women all with their own unique skills to change the direction of this war. Use your gun. Use your explosives. Even use your bare hands. Whatever you do, though, always remember to utilize your brain before taking action -- because when you're out there on the battlefield by your lonesome, it's an entirely different ball game.

Extremely tough, is how you could describe the gameplay within Commandos 2. Almost every executable action leads to a second one, and sometimes even a third or fourth. Primarily, the game centers on the premise of getting from point A to point B without getting your entire team dead. To do that, you'll constantly have to shift to and from your available party and then play around with their abilities. Certain allies can only take on specific actions. You'll need to rotate through characters like a commando, a thief, a demolitions expert, and even a dog to which all serve special functions. For instance, you may think to yourself that just anyone can outfit themselves with sexy clothing and be able to trick the enemy by seducing them in order to gain access to whatever you're after. Not so. Only a female character known as a "seductress" can confront this challenge, as the ability will be blocked off from other character usage, and vice versa for every useable person in the game. With that said, you can be sure there's more than enough challenges that will pose themselves for you around every corner.

Unfortunately though, there's just way too much to handle in offing and defending against the broad challenges at hand. Like I mentioned earlier on, you'll come across tactics that have an order of operation. Each move you make will lead to another one in a string of button presses that may leave the player a day or more just getting comfortable with the controller setup. Sometimes you may or may not want to kill an enemy, depending on the situation -- like if they're under observation or not. Let's say they are, so the best choice might be to knock them out, hog tie them, and lift them off the ground to another location where the enemy's teammate won't see that their buddy's been bruised and mistreated.

Here's how the entire procedure works. First you'll need to press the L1 button in order to switch the character into the interactive mode onto the hand icon, if the mode's cursor isn't already on it. Second, you'll need to sneak up behind the enemy's position in an inconspicuous spot where there's no possibility that a foe's visibility or hearing can lay in your direction. Once you're close enough for the enemy target icon to appear, which lets you know that you're ready for action against them, then you'll need to press the X button to punch the enemy towards the ground. He may be down, but he's not out. Before he wakes up from his short lived slumber, you'll need to press L1 again to access a group of new icons -- with the first letting you perform the maneuver to string him up by pressing the X button again. By now, the enemy can no longer move. But the excitement must wait, for the last step has to do with dragging the body off elsewhere. Doing this requires pressing the R1 button to then switch the icon over to the lift picture, and then pressing X heaves the enemy over your back. Finally, you can trot over to any place that isn't within an enemy's line of sight where pressing the triangle button gets him off of you and out of your way for the rest of the mission.

Other actions include swimming on top of and under water, crawling across multiple surfaces, climbing poles, running to and from any which place, jumping from on top of high ledges, and even steering a number of enemy vehicles including a tank. Simpler actions like these are easier to get a hold of. But like with everything else in the game, the camera system can be more of an enemy than the enemy itself. Peering down on each open environment at every little character in an overhead view, your job is to know everything going on in each tiny segment. Similar in ways to the Metal Gear series, enemy soldiers are equipped with a broad range of sight made up of two pieces: a short view and a long one. If you're facing the ground on your stomach and crawling through the long view, enemies won't spot you. However, if you're in the shorter view span, enemies will notice you whether you're crawling or standing up. Given the fact that each level is littered with still and moving enemies in an arranged order, it's up to you to figure out how to slip past everything with the faulty camera in place.

Commando 2's camera only covers so much perspective that's really never enough. By accessing the game's menu, you can select the option to view the opposition's line if sight. Unlike in Metal Gear Solid however, it's only possible to detect a single enemy soldier's view. So every time you want to know where and how any enemy is focused on, you'll need to access the menu, select the "view enemy visibility" option, drag the camera's point of view away manually from your character in order to peer onto other parts of the game world, and check with the individual persons that lie ahead so you can plan a path for your success. Another camera flaw is the way you must manually rotate it through multiple button combinations. Pressing R2 and then rotating the R3 analog stick will spin the overhead view in a different direction, from a front, side, top, or right angle of the environment. Although, some angles are best left unused, since your eyes may be able to see new things, but other things like how your character who's behind a building, tree, wall, or any other game object are now invisible. Mainly, there's a high level of positioning the camera every which way too many times during a single mission to call the camera anything but simple.

As you can probably tell, there's a lot of stealth involved throughout the game. Without being seen is a very important tactic, as you can only operate a few characters during each mission against a ton of more enemies that are far too sharp beyond reason. They aren't the only ones who get all of the fun, though. Amongst your teammates are weapons and different items galore that put a little shine into the overall gameplay. Whether you're using some tripwire to lie across pathways, grenades to throw inside windows and blow away the insides, or mines to place down and let the enemy disintegrate from contact, there are many interesting and inventive methods in disposing of Nazi forces. More so, the item system goes as far to places as actually being able to switch and swipe between your team and even the enemy. Once you're in the interactive mode, you can get close enough to other allies, dead or gagged Nazi bodies, storage boxes, or if you're playing as the thief, behind the enemy's backside. This item system is great in a way that if you're low on ammo or health, you can take weapons and even uniforms from the opposing team (and dress up as them). In return, you can distribute every which item to your team for the ones who need it the most. To say the least, there's much, much thinking involved and required for every aspect of the game.

Detail isn't so much a priority for Commandos 2, as its visuals are looked, locked, and laid upon a 3D overhead view. Through it, players will be able to view different indoor and outdoor sights from a hectic gunfight running along a dirt road in Nazi territory outside in the wilderness, a heavily guarded fortress area branched off the sea in the night's shadow, and even Japan's own army headquarters. Tiny, bite sized models of trees, dismantled walls, shacks, steel structures, telephone poles, spotlights, tables, crates, and other such objects that are meant to fit the surroundings can be seen within the selection of locales. At their minuscule scaling, the number of objects appear in good fashion for this sort of game, with differences in texture layout and moldings that you can actually tell what everything you see is. Shades and lights blend together finely throughout these areas; covering even your own men as they pass in and out of them without problems. Although, the entirety of everything in total is enough to say that the graphics won't blow you away, or even get close enough to it.

People and other moveable individualities throughout aren't much different. Nothing about everything within the game really calls out and makes you want to view that characteristic about a certain soldier or one your teammates over and over again, because in fact everyone literally looks almost identical. Sure, there's roughly a few varieties in the description of enemies, in whether you're fighting a high ranking officer who wears a different color uniform as opposed to the lower level solider. But it doesn't matter so much, as there's so many of them scattered amongst every level. Your team isn't any different, since the character types you have power over will never change form unless you're actually fitting them with a Nazi outfit to make you into just another one of the many doubles you'll so often see. However, all isn't so bad. Each animation functions well by the way guards pace, the way your men's arm swing as they toss a grenade into the sky as those targeted burn up and blacken, and the way NPCs interact with one another through their routine course of being on the lookout or just plain firing at others than yourself all look realistic to the eye at the level it's presented.

Anything and everything that there is to be heard is yet another flawed area of Commandos 2. For starters, the music score is relatively the same no matter what level you're taken to. Somewhat of a slow moving and moody theme, the background tracks remain to flow in a loop -- even during those intense times when you're spotted by enemy forces. More so and most of the time, enemy movement is silent as a whisper. You and only you can be heard through footsteps and slithers across various surfaces, paddling through water, or even to the extremes of piloting an enemy vehicle. That is until the time comes when you're under fire and getting shot at, knocking enemies over the head with a bottle, and even flinging grenades at small or large groups and listening to the roar of flames disintegrate their life stream. But even to that extent, the overall quality of the audio effects is cheaply downgraded.

By saying there was a fantastic cast of voice actors used in Commandos 2, I would be wrong. There are a few different people used to voice English, French, and even Germanic talk. However, all of the talk they do through cut scenes before a mission is rather cheesy in execution. It's also traceable that during the actual gameplay, their comments in response to certain actions like walking through doorways or knocking out an enemy cold become too repetitious. Enemies are no different; by the way they scream the same garble after taking notice of your presence and then running to your location, sometimes continuing the same Nazi screams.