Commandos 2 Updated Preview
We extensively played through the latest build of Commandos 2--read our impressions.
Two years ago, Eidos Interactive and Spanish developer Pyro Studios introduced an innovative and fun game that was noteworthy for several reasons. Commandos was a strategy game involving tactics, action, and puzzle-solving, and it was set during World War II. You had to guide a small squad of commandos through a series of extremely dangerous missions behind enemy lines and use stealth and ambush tactics to succeed. These factors alone didn't necessarily set the game apart, but combined with challenging and clever game design, they resulted in a unique game that won a large following. Today, Pyro and Eidos are close to finishing development on the sequel, Commandos 2, which promises to be even better than the original.
We recently got our hands on a nearly finished version of Commandos 2 and played through one of the game's huge missions to get a sense of how the sequel will actually play. The preview build features a wonderful tutorial that teaches you how to control the interface and the game; in addition, this briefing is presented as a briefing by your commanding officer. The mission we played has the same high production values of the rest of the game and immerses you in the gameworld from the outset.
The first thing that we noticed in Commandos 2 was its incredible graphics. The graphics are beautiful and very detailed. The resolution is now set to 1024x768, so the designers were able to cram even more detail onto the screen. There are also various zoom levels that let you pull back for a more expansive view or zoom in to track individual characters. While the graphics in the game appear to be prerendered, the buildings and the characters are in fact fully 3D, resulting in fluid animation for the commandos and other characters in the game. In fact, seeing the new thief character scale a wall or the Green Beret swing across a telephone wire is amazing to behold, as these characters move with a lifelike grace that you won't typically find in games. The environments themselves are intricate and detailed, right down to the individual cobblestones that make up the ground of the town square. Because of the 3D graphics, you can also rotate the camera 90 degrees to give you four different angles on the environment. In addition, you can divide the screen into windows (up to six of them) to let you track up to six different parts of the screen at once, which comes in handy when you've split up your commandos and still want to see them and any nearby soldiers who might be getting too close.
The sound in our build of Commandos 2 was certainly up to par with recent games, and the music was suspenseful and dramatic. However, the voices of the characters don't quite mesh yet. For instance, the thief, who is supposedly a French character, sounded like a wisecracking American kid. But the Green Beret sounded suitably gruff and direct.
As noted before, the entire game seems to have high production values. The graphics are excellent, and they combine with the voice acting and music to pull you immediately into the game's fiction. Even the tutorials look like they'll be well done--your commanding officer will show you secret papers that detail how to conduct yourself during operations. Once you're roped in, nothing in the game pulls you out of the context, including the mission briefings.
Commandos 2: Men of Courage Quick Links
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- Eidos Interactive
- Pyro Studios
- Real-Time Strategy
- Release: Sep 20, 2001 »
- ESRB: Teen
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