Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines is a great 90s PC game. It is genuinely a great RTS. Perhaps it’s one of the greatest Spanish-made games of all time. Commando was a big success, selling 1 million copies, and many people remember it fondly.
But it’s also not user-friendly, and it takes a really long time to understand. I’ve had this game for 10 years. Multiple times, I abandoned the game because the learning curve was just too much. Only recently, because I was highly motivated to finally “crack” this game, have I finally understood how it works.
The biggest problem is there’s no hovertext around buttons. There’s nothing that tells you what anything does. It therefore takes a lot of trial and error to figure things out.
Yes, there’s a tutorial but it isn’t very interactive. But even without the tutorial, it’s easy to forget things. Hovertext would be so easy to implement just as a nice reminder, and it would improve quality of life drastically.
That said, once you get past those humps, there’s fun to be had with Commandos. What separates it from other RTS games of the era is that, instead of base-building, you command a small group that goes on stealth missions behind enemy territory.
And you have to be quite careful with how you neutralize the enemy because the moment they see you, they will do everything in their power to kill you. The moment you lose one man, the game is over.
The stealth invites a lot of creativity. You could blow up a building to create a distraction while your other men disable the perimeter. Or you can crawl your towards the machine gunner, knife him in the back, then blow up a gas canister to kill the rest of the enemy in one go.
Graphically, this is quite 90s in its aesthetic. Sometimes I forget that isometric perspectives were the height of 3D graphics, especially on PC. I like the textures and the environments. However, sometimes your men are hard to see.
I wish this game had a soundtrack. However, the silence builds up the suspense. The ambient sounds make me feel like I’m walking a tightrope.
At one time the developer, Pyro Studios, was a premiere developer of RTS games. They made an expansion pack and two sequels. Praetorians and Imperial Glory were two other RTS games they made. Unfortunately, Planet 51 didn’t succeed, and Pyro Studios was forced to lay off many employees. Last I checked, they make mobile games.
Nowadays, this is an inexpensive game. Steam sells it for C$5.69, while GOG.com includes the original game and the Beyond the Call of Duty expansion pack together for C$8.19. That’s pretty good value!
If you can get through the steep learning curve, Commandos can be fun.
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