To be quite frank, I love the idea of being able to control the tides of a battle guerilla style.

X-Com, Fallout Tactics, General Chaos, The Master of Monsters and a slew of other popular and forgotten entries litter my experience like mines on the beach of Normandy. So passionate about the genre in fact, that I'll even attempt the most anally reflective product the subset can manufacture. Break out your thumb sticks and thinking caps, and it's off to the show! Gameplay I'm a huge fan of just about any tactical strategy game. Putting you in control of a plethora of Dirty Dozen type characters, the paper-thin storyline really only serves as a near-transparent bridge between the different stages and its locations, and the objectives are just as simple: Be it victory through hostage rescue, enemy elimination, or another method best left to the imagination, your squad has to swim, climb, run, shoot, steal, and crawl their way through a dozen massive scenarios that tell a not-so public story of World War II.

After a rather convincing full motion video showing actual footage of World War II, Hitler, and the British Special Forces, it's established that you are Sergeant 'Tiny' McHale, leader of the European commandos and one of the only offensive weapons that the early allies have against the Third Reich and its Japanese ally. Premise The idea behind Commandos 2: Men of Courage is pretty straight forward. Might I add however, that it was a revelation that didn't come without its own modest share of perilous adventure and numbingly anxious bouts of reloading. Eventually, I figured out exactly what I needed to know (the answers are much clearer when you're not swearing at your television set in a dubious rage) and the responsibility of fulfilling my duties as an editor to help out our curious readers was a proposition I could honestly tackle. As much as I played through the game's many missions and daunting scenarios, I couldn't quite figure out if I liked the Pyro Studios-developed action-clicker, or just kept going for the end in a bout of pure determination. After all, I've been doing this for quite some time now, and weighing the good aspects with the bad has slowly become a natural process I undertake the second I play anything - regardless of its beginnings.īut with the long overdue console unveiling of hardcore PC favorite Commandos 2: Men of Courage on the PlayStation 2, I'm left with the distinct feeling of an impossibility to judge an almost indistinguishable gray area that leaves me scratching my head in wonderment and disbelief. A strategy and action fanatic to be sure, I would have thought going in that talking about a simple hybrid of the two genres would have been a walk in the park. I'm going to come clean with it right from the outset: this is one of the most difficult reviews I've ever had to pen in my professional career.

Commandos 2 walkthrough