Commandos - Strike Force

Turning a squad-tactics series into a first-person shooter is the kind of decision that usually signals a publisher chasing a trend, and in 2006 the trend was Call of Duty. Pyro Studios at least understood what it was giving up. The isometric view that made the earlier Commandos games work as puzzles was gone, and with it the ability to see every guard's cone of vision at once. What replaced it was a three-man roster you switch between as missions demand: the Green Beret for close work, the sniper for patience, and the spy, whose stolen uniforms let him walk past checkpoints until an officer looks too closely.

The spy is the most interesting thing here and the clearest link back to the series' roots. Disguises degrade under scrutiny, certain ranks see through them, and a botched conversation turns a quiet corridor into a firefight you are badly equipped to win. Played carefully, those sections still carry real tension. Played impatiently, the game collapses into a mediocre shooter, because the gunplay is stiff and the enemy AI swings between oblivious and psychic without much in between.

The campaign moves through France, Norway and Stalingrad, and the Soviet chapters give the level designers their best material: burnt-out apartment blocks, sniper duels across rubble, a sense of scale the French missions never manage. The PlayStation 2 build pays for that ambition. Frame rate dips under smoke and fire, textures are muddy even by 2006 standards, and the draw distance undercuts the sniper role in exactly the places it should shine.

Critics were rough on it, and the series never recovered; this was the last Commandos game for well over a decade. That reputation is a little harsher than the game deserves. It is uneven rather than incompetent, and the moments where stealth, disguise and a single well-placed shot line up feel like nothing else on the console. The trouble is how often those moments are separated by corridors of ordinary shooting.

Worth returning to as a record of a studio trying to translate its own design language into a genre that had no room for it. The translation fails more than it succeeds, but the failures are specific and interesting, which is more than most licensed-era shooters can claim.