Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines

Release Date - June 24, 1998 (EU)

Developer - Pyro Studios

Publisher - Eidos Interactive

Platform - PC

A group of hardened military experts are sent deep into enemy territory to strike a fatal blow to the Nazi war machine. Danger lurks around every corner. You’re outnumbered, outgunned and there are no reinforcements. Welcome to Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines.

The concept of following a small group of crack operatives in World War II wasn’t a new idea in 1998, but there were not many games that took the approach of making it tactical and subterfuge based. 

Spanish based developer Pyro Studios put together a title with the utmost focus on planning and preparation. Indeed, the game was created because Pyro Studios noticed a lack of tactical action games on the market.

Infiltrating enemy locations is the name of the game. You’ll need all your team’s skills.

Taking the role of an Allied officer, the player will instruct a group of six commandos in a variety of missions against the Nazis. These missions cover three theatres of war; Nazi-occupied Norway, North Africa and finally, France. As the game progresses, so does the war, and the stakes (and rewards) get higher with each new task.

The player is assigned different commandos for each mission, with each soldier under your control providing a unique set of skills. Some commandos are better suited to certain tasks over others, so becoming familiar with them all and knowing their capabilities is paramount to success in this game. And trust me, this game will demand that you learn and use the abilities correctly. Defeat comes quickly, and can be crushingly brutal at times.

There’s a machine gunner watching this dam very closely. You’ll need a spy dressed as an officer to get across it.

The total team is made up of a green beret, marine, driver, sapper, sniper, and spy. As you might expect, the Green Beret will do the majority of ‘wet work’ with his trusty knife, decoy radio device and ability to hide in snow or sand. He also is the most burly of the group and can carry heavy objects and bodies to hide the. Your spy, a Frenchman with fluent German language skills, can disguise himself as a Nazi officer to bypass enemy soldiers. A strong ability, offset by the fact that uniforms generally have to be found in the field first. The driver can drive any land vehicle in the game (including tanks). The Marine can scuba dive and carries an inflatable raft. The sapper is your man for any kind of explosives work, and the sniper can drop a target from a massively long range (albeit with limited ammunition).

The green beret and spy make a hasty escape.

Learning to use each soldier’s abilities is where the fun and challenge of the game lies. It’s possible to set a decoy with the green beret that leads a soldier into a trap set by the sapper. You can infiltrate underwater areas with the marine to commandeer a boat that allows you to get your spy into a high security area. You can get your sniper to take out a guard in a watch-tower, allowing him to get behind the wheel (err, sticks?) of a Panzer IV. Putting it all together requires a lot of planning, coordination and some creative thinking. Don’t be dismayed if it takes a few (or several dozen) attempts to succeed at each mission. This game can be punishingly hard, especially considering it all takes place in real-time meaning that timing is often as important as having the right game-plan. Guards will have set patrols, and often the best course of action is to slip by them when they have their back turned. This window might be small, and made all the smaller by other patrolling guards in the same vicinity. The game will forgive you for tripping an alarm, as you don’t get handed a ‘game over’ until you actually lose a man or a critical objective. Its entirely possible to recover from a bungled infiltration, but can be quite difficult. Hey, if it were easy they wouldn’t have called in the commandos!

At the end of each mission you’ll be given a rating, and slowly get promoted through the ranks.

This difficulty is offset somewhat by being able to save and load anywhere during a mission. This is partly what makes the game so compelling, you always feel like you’re oh-so close to cracking the challenge and passing the mission. You might get caught by a guard at the last minute, but you just can’t walk away from the game until you clear the objective! At the end of each mission you’re assigned a rating for your performance, and you can even rise through the ranks as you get better and deliver better results! Some solid replay value for die-hard fans.

Your men are not expendable so unlike some games you cannot leave any man behind. Planning an escape route is an important aspect of the game. Good thing that your men are all very likeable fellows, with individual voice acting and their own personalities. You’ll come to learn each commando by their accent and mannerisms, whether its the Marine’s cockney and somewhat annoyed tone or the Sniper’s upper-class cadence and ice-cold, imperturbable attitude as you he responds to a command to kill a soldier with a casual ‘Yep…’. Beyond just wanting to get a good rating on your mission, you’ll genuinely want to keep your dedicated soldiers alive. For a game that can be very cold and calculating, building that personality for your men is a nice achievement. The voice work is paired with a really fitting soundtrack. Subtle and minimal during gameplay, it has a film-score quality and fits the era perfectly without ever being overbearing or distracting you from important sound effects like guards alerting each other, or your men giving you an update on their tasks.

Objectives become increasingly more risky and higher stake as the game progresses.

The graphics of Commandos are very nicely detailed. This means the game not only looks fantastic, but also aids the gameplay and planning. It is very important to know if that wall is six foot high or three foot high so you can tell at a glance if it’ll block someone’s line of sight. Did you park the truck in a way that blocks the exit? Your men even leave footprints in snow or sand that the enemy can spot! They will slowly fade over time too, so having a clear visual of your tracks is hugely important in this game.

Thankfully the gorgeously drawn, detailed environments mean you can get fully immersed. The attention to detail on the vehicles and buildings has to be seen to be believed, with some lovingly created sprites for armoured cars, tanks and even railway artillery guns. Blowing them to smithereens is all the more satisfying! Take that, Jerry.

Each theatre of war has its own feel to it too. Operations in Norway are in snow covered fields and frigid waterways. Going to North Africa and traversing the desert is a great change of scenery before coming back to the metropolitan streets of Paris. 

Commandos was not expected to be very successful, with the game initially expected to be no more than a niche title. As a result, Commandos didn’t receive a lot of promotion on launch, and the studio believes it may have had unexpected success due to positive word of mouth. It also would have received some boost via good critical reviews, having been received favourably at the time of release by a variety of gaming magazines and websites. It’s easy to see why the game was so beloved at launch, it really stands out from the pack as a unique and addictive experience. From an initial sales expectation of only 15,000 units, Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines smashed these goals and reportedly had sold 600,000 units by November 1998! By May 2000, Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines and its expansion pack Beyond the Call of Duty had sold a combined 1.5 million copies! That’s one hundred times the original forecast! 

Positioning is key, the boat is hidden from the patrol’s sight by the lighthouse!

With sales like that, it’s no wonder that Commandos was able to spawn three sequels over the years, and even a remaster in 2019. The game is so fondly remembered that spiritual successors/spin-offs have been made in the years since like the Desperados series or Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun (2016). Despite the imitators, there really is something very special about the original Commandos, and the combination of gritty World War II subterfuge with some colourful and deadly soldiers. That is all, commander. Dismissed!

This is an extremely unique feeling and addictive tactical action game. You may be frustrated, but in a good way!