Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines
1998 · Pyro Studios
Has it aged?Why ↓
Commandos is a fixed-view, real-time stealth tactics game set in the Second World War. You direct specialist soldiers through guarded maps, distracting enemies, knifing sentries and carrying bodies out of sight. Making a route safe is enormously satisfying; getting your squad through it demands patience rather than firepower.
Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines is a real-time tactics game set in World War II that puts you in command of a small squad of elite troopers. Send them behind enemy lines on a series of hazardous missions, and bring them back alive.
The publisher’s description, from its Steam store page.
What it looks like
the trailer, then the store's own shots
The verdict
Play it for the pleasure of dismantling a guarded position one carefully concealed killing at a time. Its twenty missions give you room to invent solutions, but the 1998 design makes coordinating soldiers harder than it should be: their toolkits are rigid, and simultaneous attacks require manual switching. The intricate patrol puzzles have aged better than the controls. Beyond the Call of Duty is the worthwhile follow-up, giving more soldiers useful ways to distract and subdue guards.
Play it if
You enjoy watching patrol routes for minutes, finding a gap in a guard's vision cone, and clearing a path one sentry at a time. You save carefully and would rather rethink an ambush than lower the difficulty.
Skip it if
Anyone who wants to recover from mistakes by charging in with guns. Alerts bring extra patrols, and losing even one commando ends the mission. If repeatedly reloading a painstaking infiltration would make you quit, leave this alone.
Common questions
- Why does Tiny, the Green Beret, do so much of the work?
- He combines the radio decoy, knife, corpse carrying, climbing and the ability to bury himself. The other five specialists have much narrower toolkits, so clearing a route often depends heavily on him.
- Can I queue attacks for several commandos to execute together?
- No. There is no system for synchronising prepared actions: you must switch between soldiers and issue commands yourself, making a coordinated grenade, rifle and submachine-gun attack fiddly to execute.
- What does Beyond the Call of Duty add?
- The eight-mission add-on adds distractions such as stones and cigarette packets, plus equipment including a blackjack, chloroform and handcuffs. Those tools give more of the squad something useful to do instead of leaving so much to the Green Beret.
- Can I rotate the maps or display the radio decoy's range?
- The maps allow zooming but have a single fixed perspective. Weapons and devices such as the radio decoy have no displayed range rings, so you cannot read their reach directly from an overlay.
What everyone else said
we link, we don't reprintHas it aged?
How does it hold up today? Based on recent reviews, how opinions have changed since launch, player activity and updates.
% positive each month, last 4 years.
Reviews via Steam ↗Peak: 147 in Apr 2020.
Player counts via SteamCharts ↗Still well liked.
The developer posts no update notes on Steam, so we can't tell.