Experiment with skills and weapons in a challenging “against the odds” gameplay style.
Interactive environments: steal enemy uniforms and weapons, climb poles, swing from cables, swim, utilize vehicles, and climb in/out of buildings, ships and planes.The Commandos series’ first appearance on Nintendo Switch™: rotate the environment 360 degrees, move seamlessly in and out of buildings, submarines, planes and underwater, and zoom in and out of the environment.Re-imagined in HD with reworked controls, modernized UI and an overhauled tutorial.This remaster not only fails to modernise the game, it somehow makes it even less accessible and enjoyable for newcomers and old hands alike. Experience Commandos 2 Men of Courage like never before in high definition with reworked controls, UI and tutorial. Make no bones about it, Commandos 2 is exactly the kind of classic game that needs proper modernisation to appeal to a new audience. Relive the real-time tactics masterpiece that defined the genre like no other: Originally developed by the legendary Pyro Studios, Commandos 2 HD Remaster is a true homage to one of gaming’s most celebrated masterpieces. I had quite fond memories of Commandos 2, but it’s abundantly clear that this remaster is not only a poor console port, but a generally underwhelming attempt to ‘modernise’ a classic. It undoubtedly looks better than the original, with cleaner-looking visuals and UI (even if they aren’t backed up by the underlying muddled mechanics), and if (a BIG if) you can wade through the burst sewer pipe’s worth of problems and get to grips with the mechanics of the game, then it has fleeting moments of thrilling tension that aren’t just down to wondering if the unwieldy controls are going to fail you again. There are mild positives to this remaster. Very little has been done to make Commandos 2 HD palatable for modern audiences on console.
Still, it doesn’t make it any less of a baffling pain in the backside, and thrown together with the technical faults that could have been tweaked or fixed even slightly to ease the burden of a creaking RTS framework, it destroys any tangible enjoyment you could get out of Commandos 2. After all, this comes from the early days of stealth in games, and as such, there’s a fuzzy understanding of what should and shouldn’t work in tandem with mechanics. That’s not a character trait, that’s a fairly shite elite soldier and human being. Where there should be tension and excitement as you line up your squad to pull off some covert sabotage instead becomes a game of chance where you might fail because you forgot one guy can’t gag a Nazi like the rest or throw down a ladder. The responsiveness of a mouse and keyboard is very much needed to keep up with the speed of the sneaky juggling act of skill-based soldiers, especially as these military trained hard bastards have a complete inability to do certain simple tasks because it’s deemed a ‘skill’ for another member of their team. The same goes for selecting tools and actions. The transition between characters is slow, unpredictable, and sometimes unresponsive, causing unfair failure on multiple occasions. Switching between characters and elements of the UI is deathly slow. It’s almost as if someone involved with this thought that releasing a complex, disjointed, poorly-aged RTS with hardcore appeal would be enough because hey, those kids like them some Dark Souls, right? And that’s tough? Not for the first time in the past decade since the Souls games gained prominence, someone confuses challenge with needless frustration. Again, this could be fairly chalked up to a quirk of the game’s age, but that inflexibility, alongside the real-time aspect, lack of checkpointing, and the fiddly, overwhelming, and frankly buggy, controls snowball until it becomes oh-so-easy to find fault with practically everything about this remaster.