Commandos Strike Force Demo

If there's anything the Commandos series taught players over the years, it's that stealth and tactics are much more effective than brute force, especially when you are heavily outnumbered and you do not possess the required firepower to assault the enemy base. Moreover, every team mate is vital in the final outcome of the mission, since each one of them has a different set of skills and abilities that come in handy in battle.

For the fist time ever, the Commandos franchise gambles it all away by changing almost everything about itself, including the core gameplay mechanics and the classic, but effective isometric view of the battlefield, through the release of Commandos Strike Force. This time around, you get to play from a first-person perspective and jump into the skin of your soldiers, as well as take advantage of their various skills from a more personal point of view.

Naturally, this means that much of the charm that characterized the series has vanished, since you no longer have the luxury of planning your mission step-by-step in order to avoid the enemy troops. Now, you even start out by being thrown into the middle of a firefight, which does not end without a few dozen bodies on the ground and quite the stack of bullet shells.

Although it was to be expected, things get far more complicated and difficult to get right from a first-person point of view, especially things like stealth and sneaking around. Hence, beside the fact that you are denied the luxury of stealth most of the time, the enemy AI is very poorly made and it does not really matter if you are sneaking around, because the chance of them seeing you remains the same even if they are facing you.

Technically, the game features a good-looking graphic engine, as well as nice animations and credible special effects to top it all off. Despite that, the numerous bugs and AI problems make it very difficult to enjoy the views, even if you can quickly change between the three available commandos whenever you need their respective skill sets.

In the end, the scripted events and cutscenes take away the freedom you had in the preview titles, since you cannot simply wander around the map and choose the best course of action anymore, but just follow the path toward the end of the level. Thus, while Commandos Strike Force cannot necessarily be called a bag game, it certainly does not belong in the franchise at hand.