#pyro studio

[wookiefragger]

20 years ago today, Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines was released in North America, and PC gamers have been screaming in frustration at their monitors ever since.

[steamgameaday]

Commandos: Beyond the Call of Duty (1999)

Developer: Pyro Studio Genre: Realtime Tactics Price: £3.99

Commandos: Beyond the Call of Duty is apparently a standalone expansion to the similarly titled Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, and with it's ugly as sin textures and laughably silly looking UI appears to be a vestige of the bad old days of gaming. Which it is, in every sense of the term.

After 25 minutes of completely non-interactive tutorials narrated by the world's most cheery englishman, I got the basic grasp of things. The concept seemed simple enough; a team of individually-controlled specialists sneak around Nazi installments taking out guards and completing objectives. The team included a Heavy (or Green Beret) who specialised in close combat, a sniper with a limited ammo cache, a Royal Marine with the ability to dive and pilot dinghies, A sapper with explosives and beartraps, a Driver with the ability to use any ingame vehicle, and a spy who could take enemy uniforms and make silent attacks. So far, so much potential for strategy. A quick test of skills in a training sandbox made me confident that I understood the game enough to try out the campaign.

Loading up the game for real, I was presented with an FMV of suitably Nazi-filled newsreels, plot exposition, and a mission briefing. The game then dumped me on a small dinghy just off of the island of Guernsey.

Paddling the dinghy round the rocks I was immediately spotted by a mounted gunner on the docks and my team and their boat were peppered with bullets and ripped to shreds. Fair enough, I thought, that was a pretty stupid move on my part. And I pressed 'restart mission'.

The FMV began to replay, and I franticly searched around for a button to skip it (Esc, naturally) and begin the mission once more. This time I took it slower, moving the boat around the side of the rocks carefully and putting it into a safe position so that I could carefully consider my next move.

Then the alarm went off. 

Looking at the green line of sight diagram, the game was telling me that the person who spotted me either didn't exist or was inside the island itself. Realising that the lines of sight diagrams only worked in 2 dimensions whilst the actual lines of sight worked in 3, I figured out that a previously unforeseen guard on the top of the lighthouse. Fair enough.

So restart mission, skip FMV, skip exposition, skip mission briefing.

I position myself closer to the lighthouse, and have my sniper set up a shot. The scope shows up red; no line of sight between the boat and the guard. I prepare to move in closer, when suddenly, the alarm goes off.

Wait, what?

The guard, whom my sniper does not have a line of fire towards, is firing quite easily at my dinghy with his standard rifle, quickly and easily dispatching my team. 

This seemed somewhat unfair.

So I restarted the mission, skipped the FMV, skipped the exposition, skipped the mission briefing and tried again. 

Positioning myself in a slightly different but similar position to the previous attempt, I successfully sniped the man on the highest tower and carefully took myself down towards the dock again, this time hiding directly behind a rock. Again, there was no line of sight; the sniper's scope showed up red when placed on the guards on the dock.

Naturally, I was spotted almost instantly.

Despite the fact that I was just barely in sniping distance from the dock, that the line of fire was blocked, and that no alarm had been set off to make the guards search for me, my dinghy was once again shredded to pieces almost instantly (need I remind you, through a rock) and the mission was once again failed.

Sod it, I thought. Whilst conserving sniper fire is a pretty important approach to the game, there just didn't seem to be any other way through. I restarted the level, skipped the FMV, skipped the exposition, skipped the mission briefing and moved into action. Swiftly I sniped the man on the tower before I could be noticed, then took out the two men on the dock before they could raise an alarm. At last, a foothold! Moving my dinghy into the dock, the alarm went off. The dead bodies had been discovered by a roaming patrol which served as my firing squad. The team were dead immediately.

This was the first level, and this was on 'easy' difficulty.

I'm starting to think I have the wrong hobby.

Time Played - 58 Minutes Did I finish it? - I barely started it. Would I finish it? - No. Less than an hour into this thing I wanted to scream at someone, so I can't imagine what actually trying to play this monstrosity seriously would be like. Hell, I didn't even want to load it back up to take bloody screenshots.