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A sniper, a green beret and a spy….oh my

Commandos: Strike Force (CSF) puts a new spin on your typical WWIIFPS. That new spin, is the ability to switch between three differentcharacters during gameplay. While you’re not able to switch between allthree during every level of the game, most levels will allow you tochange back and forth between at least two characters. Occasionallyyou’ll be stuck with just one character for a portion or perhaps theentire mission.

This sounds like an interesting concept doesn’t it? In theory itis. However, during gameplay there are issues with the ‘switch’ conceptas well as other issues we need to go over. Read on…

Gameplay:
The gameplay is hit or miss like a blind man throwing darts. Some things impressed me, while others just bewildered me.

Let’s start with the basics. You have your standard FPS control layout except for one glaring missing thing. There is noability to go prone in the game. Think about it for a second. Ok, theGreen Beret is probably not going to be going prone very often. Thespy? More than the Green Beret. The sniper? Yes, oh my god yes. You doa fair amount of sniping during the game too. Unlike other games,crouching while you’re the sniper does nothing to help you aim better.There is a ‘hold breath’ key which is default mapped for L-Alt. Hittingthis while zoomed in brings you in to a ‘bullet time’ mode. Everythingslows down and you can crank off your round with superb accuracy.

The sniper has other weapons usually available to him as well; asidearm and knives. The knives are useful when you want to silentlytake down an enemy. While I was playing, I wanted to see how far Icould take out an enemy with a knife. I noticed there was an arc when Ithrew one. What I did was aim farther and farther above an enemies headuntil I was able to hit them. The distance at which I was able to hitan enemy soldier and kill them was ridiculously long. I can’t imagineanyone throwing a knife, intending to kill someone in this overexaggerated arc and having any kind of effectiveness or accuracy. Aglaring faux pas that should have been fixed.

The spy has to be the most interesting character in the game. He’sa German colonel who has decided to join the good guys. He has theability to kill enemy soldiers and steal their uniforms to be worn as adisguise.

Letme talk about the disguise portion first. This was one area of the gamethat did impress me. Your enemies have ranks. Soldiers, sub-officers,officers, generals and Gestapo. When you dawn an enemy soldier’suniform, you’re able to walk amongst your enemies without beingimmediately detected. However, if you’re wearing a soldier’s uniformand you stay near an enemy soldier too long, he’ll start to be comesuspicious of you. A little question mark meter will appear above hishead and will start to count down. During this countdown, you havereally two options. Kill him and hope that no one sees you take him outor run away and he’ll forget about you. Now for example, if you put onan officer’s uniform, soldiers and sub-officers will not becomesuspicious of you at all. Other officers and anything higher rankinglike a Gestapo will recognize you after a period of time will. Theobject here obviously is to get a higher ranking uniform each time youcan in order to gain yourself more freedom when moving around.

The spy in my opinion had the coolest gadgets and weapons. He haspiano wire which he uses for stealth kills, a silenced sidearm anddistraction devices, such as a coin or cigarettes. Using thedistraction devices will sometimes get the attention of an enemy solider that will hopefully move into a better area where you can decide his fate.

The Green Beret has to be the least interesting of all thecharacters. To sum him up quickly, he’s your typical Army soldier.There is nothing really special about him besides the fact that hecarries weapons with higher firepower than the others do.

There is somewhat of an interesting storyline to the game. Itreally kept me going from chapter to chapter to see what unfolded next,until the final outcome was revealed. In hindsight, it really wasn’t avery interesting plot, but it did work for the game. Upon passing alevel, a cutscene takes place and you’re given more insight to thecharacters and overall story.

Let me get into more gameplay issues such as the AI. The AI was horridly hit or miss. The enemies are supposedto be aware of their surroundings. There was a countless amount oftimes where I performed a stealth kill with another solider standing nomore than twenty yards away and didn’t notice a thing. Other times, Icould use my silenced weapon and kill one person in a room and the guystanding next to him wouldn’t even budge.

When you kill an enemy his body and weapons remain for a shortperiod of time before they disappear. Another feature which should havebeen incorporated into the game was the ability to move a body.Sadly, it’s not and you have to hope that another enemy soldier whileon patrol won’t notice the body until it disappears.

You have a mini-radar while playing in the lower left hand corner.On this display are your objectives and arrows which are indicators foryour enemies. The arrows will show which way a solider is facing aswell as his alert level. Green indicates he’s just minding his ownbusiness, yellow means he’s grown suspicious and red means he’s on thehunt for you. Here’s another example of a glaring AI issue. I left abody on the floor in the path of another soldier. He sees the body andis really pissed off now. He’s red and running around trying to findme. Eventually his level turns from red to yellow to green and hesimply gives up. I find it pretty difficult to swallow that a soldierwould see one of his buddies lying on the ground and after a two minutesearch, just give up and tell no one else.

When you walk up to a closed door, you have two options. One issimply to open the door and the other is to go into a keyhole viewmode, where yes, you look through the keyhole. What just boggles themind is why I could open a door with a solider standing on the otherside of it and he wouldn’t even turn to see who opened the door.

Other times the AI was spot on. I tried to shoot a solider with mysilenced handgun from a distance and instead of getting a headshot likeI wanted (yes, you can from almost any distance too) I only woundedhim. Off he ran yelling “Alarm! Alarm!” All the nearby soldiers turnedred and were after me. That’s how it should have been constantlythrough the game.

Stealing uniforms via stealth kills or any other means for thatmatter was pretty fun. I can’t for the life of me begin to understandwhy when I have an enemy soldier’s uniform on and take out my silencedhandgun; I would automatically go back to my standard spy clothes. It’sonly when shooting too. If I tossed a gas grenade while wearing adisguise, I would still stay in the disguise. If I shot, I would haveto put my disguise back on each time. That got pretty annoying afterawhile.

As I started to indicate early on in the review, the wholeswitching concept is fine in theory. In the actual gameplay it workedout differently. Most of the time, the game made you switch betweencharacters to finish a certain portion of the level. There were veryfew opportunities where you could switch between two characters atwill, let alone all three. Come to think of it, I don’t think there wasa time at all where I was able to use all three characters at will.This switching of characters is a bit over hyped in my opinion.

Graphics:
The visuals are about as hit or miss as the gameplay was.

Ididn’t enjoy the fish bowl view while using either binoculars or thesniper scope. Each had an old appearance when viewing through them aswell. The underwater distortion while swimming was appealing too.Characters faces during gameplay were also pleasant to look at.

Background objects were done in decent detail. Nothing that isgoing to make you say “wow” or earth shattering, but not badnonetheless. Unless the objects were intended to be interactive in thegame, they did not have any reaction properties. Shooting a wall didnot leave a bullet hole or anything else for that matter. Other objectsthat were more interactive to the game looked pretty dated.

One big issue I had while playing the game was a very poor framerate. If it started to rain in the game, the frame rate plummeted or ifthere was a fire fight going on the same thing would happen. This wasconstant throughout the game too. If I was moving around by myself thegame was fine, but as soon as I started to engage two or more enemiesyou could really see the game slow down and this ruined most the gamefor me.

Sound:
To simply put it, the sound in Commandos: Strike Force wasmediocre. There wasn’t a discerning difference in sound between any ofthe weapons at all. Characters mouths just looked like a chatter boxand there was nowhere near close to matching the voices being spoken.

The ambient music’s tempo did change when you were being hunted bythe enemy which was a nice touch, but even that was just average atbest.

Overall:
Commandos: Strike Force promises gamers a bit more than it can deliver...Actually, quite a bit more than it can deliver.

There are glaring gameplay issues such as headshots with a handgunfrom almost an unlimited distance, the ability to arc a knife almosthas high as you can in order to hit enemies from a great distance andlast but not least, the AI that is either spot on or way off.

Both audio and graphics are simply average. It’s nothing youhaven’t seen before and upon playing, you’ll feel like you’re playing avery dated game.

There is absolutely no replay value for the single player versionafter you finish the game. I haven’t tried the multi-player and afterplaying through the game, honestly don’t plan to either. You’ll get agood day’s worth of gameplay depending on what difficulty you choose.You can change the difficulty at the beginning of each mission if youhappen to die. If that doesn’t work you can always save your game anytime you think you’re about to die and simply reload the game. You’llpick up from the exact same spot you saved. Talk about creating yourown checkpoints.

Save your money and save your time, only buy this if you have tohave every single WWII game ever made and even then, think it over onceor twice.