Commandos 3: Destination Berlin

by Jim "Twitch" Tittle

Article Type: Review
Article Date: December 06, 2003

Product Info

Product Name: Commandos 3: Destination Berlin
Category: Tactical Action/Strategy
Developer: Pyro Studios
Publisher: Eidos Interactive
Release Date: Released
Sys. Spec: Click Here
Multiplayer: Yes
Files & Links: Click Here





2001’s Commandos 2: Men of Courage seemed to have it all as an RTT (Real Time Tactical) game. Strategy was involved as in a RTS (Real Time Strategy) game but it was not the encompassing theme. These types of games are relatively timeless since while graphics are important they are not the driving force making the game look old in two years like flight sims have historically been.

Commandos 2 was a tough game to become one with at first but once one did myriad ways are found to achieve mission goals and simply marvel at the endless way the scenarios could be run. It was obvious that the people who put it together took great care to create the maps, buildings, vehicles and objects. Much of the genius was very subtle such as when your commando went up some stairs he was always hidden from enemy view so he could hatch some dastardly deed.

Set Up
So after waiting two years Commandos fans were drooling for C3. As before three discs were needed for installing the two gigabytes of files as they unpacked onto the hard drive. But at the prompt for the second disc my machine would not read the disc. Then I got a strange message about some file that could not be read. OK, so I figured I’d start with the first disc again. A message told me that was not going to work. So what do you do when you can’t continue and can’t begin again? I finally had to go into hidden files and delete the temporary folder with the stuff from the first disc on it.

That done, I ran the first disc again with the same results. Next time the whole of the three discs imprinted on my HD. Great. But the game wouldn’t start. I got a black screen with intro music stuck in a broken loop. After repeated pounding on the Windows key the thing disengaged. The next few attempts had the same results. Fine. I uninstalled the thing and went through the whole process again. This time the second disc cut the mustard and all installed.

The game runs with Windows 98SE/2000/XP. Curiously no mention of Windows ME is made though it post-dates 98. 256 MB RAM is required and 512 is recommended along with a 700 MHz P III or Athlon at the bottom end and a 2.0 GHz P 4 optimum. It specifically states a 32 MB nVidia GeForce or ATI Radeon with better results from a 128 MB GeForce 4ti or ATI equivalent used with DirectX 9.0. Does that mean other video cards will not perform as well? As with Commandos 2 sound hardware is not critical and it seems most will work. My machine is equal to the higher recommended one.

And as with C2 the paper manual is terse and somewhat vague. I figured it didn’t matter to me as I was quite comfortable with the Commando theorem and how things worked.

No Keys?
When I finally got the game running and stable (I had more start-up problems in getting through the company logo screens several times) I found the three campaigns one could choose to begin in. In previous Commandos you started at the beginning and had to finish each mission in sequence to get to the end.

Right away I noticed something was wrong. There was no legend in the manual as Commandos 2 had explaining the many re-programmable hot keys. There were only five keys of consequence besides the hint, map and view keys. There was no setup screen for resolution adjustment. The game is locked at 800X600. Many are livid about this. C2 had three resolution settings up to 1024X768.

In C2 every weapon or action was controlled by the mouse and/or a hot key. There was an inset icon group one could toggle on and off but one quickly learned to use keys for swifter, smoother action response and movement. C3 is all icons. In a combat flight sim it would correlate to having to click open a group of icons and then select the proper icon to activate guns after you were firing missiles instead of hitting one key to arm your guns.

Gameplay
The first and second campaigns begin with missions in snow. To me the snow flakes are overdone and badly out of scale. They often look like a blanket of snowballs flying by. Gamers like weather effects but not at the expense of clarity and range of view. It should be ambiance not a handicap. Other missions in the rain worked and while in a very heavy deluge I could still clearly see.

Snowballs or snowflakes?

Commandos 2 had briefings that showed the player exactly what to do to finish a mission. Things such as “we can enter the base here and find explosives here to blow up this fuel tank here,” all the while the camera is illustrating the place in the “here.” C3 only does that in a few instances leaving the player rather lost as to how to accomplish the mission goals. Commandos always was an exercise in experimenting on how to penetrate a base, neutralize the enemy unseen or unheard, and sabotage enemy assets. How you went about it was trial and error with lots of restarts and tons of “quicksave” to provide restart points when you got killed. I was prepared for that.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the icon groups. In this title one must move the mouse to the bottom of the screen, click open the icon group, click on the icon of the weapon you want and then click on the enemy you want to use it on. All this takes your eyes away from the action. Commandos 2 did have the iconic groups but had hot keys with one doing the same thing. All one needed to do to switch from a pistol to a knife was to hit one key and click on the enemy. The ergonomics of the iconic click-o-thon in the user interface makes for ridiculously long preparations for actions. With a hot key one could do it by touch.

Opening icon groups encroaches into screen even more

And the icons moved. If you used the knife a couple minutes before and it was on the left side of an icon group and you picked up an assault rifle and then wanted to use the knife again after using you pistol, the knife icon had migrated to another position forcing visual acquirement to activate it again.

This affair was, no doubt, a by-product of X-box style games which use no keyboards. Make a UI for one and use it on both is the obvious corner-cutting theory at work here though allegedly Eidos supposedly has no plans to release the title for console hardware. People who never had previous Commandos titles don’t know how good the hot keys worked. So the PC users lose.

Bugs Abound
Besides that gripe voiced on the Eidos forum by all users accustomed to the earlier titles I found serious bugs and flaws abounding like nothing I’ve ever seen in a combat game or sim. People had text problems, crashes, lost ‘saved’ games and much more. I experienced a general lethargy in most missions of the game in that mouse reaction was slowed, screens froze or stuttered during view changes and the one excellent exterior to interior transitions were flawed. The interiors, when entered, were off screen center and partially off the screen forcing centering before assessment of the situation. Once inside the interior graphics moved drunkenly in response to mouse or arrow key input.

Interiors are off-center & have nothing in them

And those interiors in C2 were once a source of “goodies” to find in boxes and cupboards. Equipment, weapons and items abounded for commando use. C3’s interiors, while acceptable in graphic detail, are sterile in comparison. It looks as if the people laying out C3 threw in a bunch of rooms with enemies stooging about in them for the sake of it in an effort to fool veteran players into thinking it was a cool as the Colditz Castle of C2 with its dozens of rooms. The vast majority of these rooms have nothing in them that the player needs for mission completion.

The commandos themselves are used in mostly pairs and single scenarios eradicating the whole team concept. Some familiar faces are present only in one abbreviated mission or not at all. The missions themselves number nine. C2 had eighteen missions of which half were shorter bonus missions. Many of C3’s missions are about equal in length to those bonus missions.

Too many missions are timed

Originally it was trumpeted that twenty-four missions would be included. And it’s not only the half number, the missions themselves are abbreviated ghosts leaving the player feeling gypped. C2 was a game that allowed the player to strategize and invent dozens of new ways to approach a mission and complete them at a leisurely, satisfying pace. Many missions are timed in C3 completely destroying the enjoyment factor that we all want in spending time with a game after the first couple run-throughs. It’s part of value for the dollar. Are you going to fire up a game six months old and try a new approach or is it gathering dust on a shelf?

Obvious flaws were as simple as an officer dressed in a soldier uniform. You found out he was an officer after you killed him and examined him. Others were more subtle like when in the D-Day mission you have ONE commando, the powerhouse Tiny or Green Beret as he is called. Crawling through a trench from point A to point B a couple meters away he repeatedly picked up a dead German soldier and stood up into the line of fire like a berserk member of a grave detail. I had “quicksaved” a few seconds before this and it happened over and over on restart.

At times Tiny would take rounds or punches and his health bar would actually increase in strength. It yo-yoed up and down till he mercifully died. And punches that C2 commandos could take was drastically altered in C3. An average of four punches would kill them. To make matters worse another bug reared its ugly head in that when attempting to reply with a punch or shot you commando would repeat a half response as I banged on the key furiously. It’s been dubbed the "C3 Tango" as it looks like a little dance till he dies. Even in auto-cover mode a commando takes one hit and freezes, failing to return fire even though he outguns the enemy sub-machinegun vs. pistol and the enemy is in his short cone of fire. He just keeps saying "oochra" till he dies.

A certain mission that had rather obvious goals of dispatching a fellow that gets out of a car was flawed. In my game he never got out of the car on repeated scenarios set up with different approaches to insure his demise. Other people on the fan forum actually completed the mission by killing him. In mine the car stopped and the mission ended in failure. I found people on the fan site experiencing different bugs. This is unprecedented in bad quality control. Usually, at least, the bugs are found to be the same by all.

Singular Difficulty
There is but one difficulty setting in Commandos 3 contrary to previous ones which had three. C3 allows the player to get accustomed to the flow and workings of the game and move higher in difficulty. If a commando got killed the rest of the group could continue through the mission on harder settings to see what was up in the mission even though you could not conclude the mission as such. In C3 if one commando is killed the mission ends—boom! This contributes to the drudgery of reloading from your last save and subtracts from the fun.

Worst of all the weapon range in C3 has been reduced in comparison from C2’s “Very Hard” level by some seventy-five percent! The cone that displayed when in an auto-cover mode allows commandos to shoot anything that passing in range. That cone is also drastically narrower as well. And it conflicts with other commands. If your commando is in auto cover and you click on the knife icon and tell him to move near an enemy in preparation for a kill he does so and then pulls out his pistol and blasts him alerting all the bad guys. But the orange cone of auto cover had disappeared so you figured he was in the knife mode. Wrong. More clicking was needed.

The new Sturmgewehr 43 assault rifle is useless. Rifles like the Mauser K-98 killed with one round and still do while pistols took three. This thing does not kill with one so with the scant ranges your weapons now have you are better off with a pistol. The commando .45 pistols have unlimited ammo while scavenged German weapons are limited to what you scrounge.

Bottom Line
The whole interface using icons in icon groups is fine for word processing but even these programs have macros. There is simply too much mouse dragging and multiple icon clicking to achieve the same end as was possible in C2. One must consciously look at the icon and away from the action to be sure it is being selected and "locked" in positively. There is too much selecting and de-selecting of icons to do the same thing as could be done with one hot key by touch. It slows things down to a crawl. Ironic since many missions are timed.

A simple example: Commandos 2: -Tiny- hit the "A" key to select knife and hit "shift" as you click on a door then click on the enemy. Commandos 3: click on the door then click on Tiny to move to a position in the room then click on the icon group after dragging the slow mouse pointer (perhaps from the top of the screen) to open it then find the knife icon (which may have moved locations if he picked up any other weapon since its last use) then click on the knife icon then click on the enemy.

Vocal recordings in C3 are not as sharp and clean as C2’s. The "oochra" verbal response is ridiculous when a man is hurt. Having been a combat Marine I can assure you that is not the average guy's response. There is cussing in the briefings so at least a "damn!" is appropriate when wounded. This is not a kiddie game anyway.

Strenuous activity such as ladder climbing produces sounds similar to constipation or bad dubbing in a sex movie, I can't decide which. Vocal actors at times lose their geographic or ethnic accents in certain words or phrases. A few verbal dubs were obviously recorded on different equipment at different levels of input. Spooky, the Spy, just plain sounds like a perverted child molester. In general the weapon, explosion and combat sound effects need to be amped up anyway.

C2 was lovely in that there were infinite ways to approach and accomplish missions. I have run through many missions a hundred-plus times with others no less than fifty. Great thought was given to all aspects of ways to do things. There were often multiple ways to enter a building making for variety. One could relax after running missions for best time and such for the enjoyment of the analysis of the mission and ways to complete it beyond one dimensional stealth aspect.

Unfortunately C3 appears to have concentrated on decent graphics but smaller scale mission scenarios many of which are not at all explained as every mission was in C2 where you knew what to do and where things were located to achieve your goals. The graphics are truly no better than C2’s which were good. People thinking they are better are confusing new missions with different surroundings to superior graphics.

The lack of a primary level to get acquainted is a loss. The fact that if one commando is killed one can not proceed just to see what may be possible to accomplish in a re-run is frustrating. Hard is not the topic. Difficult is fine but it is a pure AI cheat to have reduced the C3 weapon firing ranges of commando weapons over the hardest level in C2 while increasing optical prowess of the AI to "Uber " human levels. A few punches from a little mechanic can kill the powerful Tiny before the player can even open the icon group to select the fist yet he can still take firearms hits well but not always. Quite inconsistent.

'Fins' is a singular commando in just 1 mission

Also apparent is the lack of the C2 teamwork ethic in several missions where one or two commandos are included. Sure C2 had short two-man missions more for practice or bonus than playable interest. But we see no C3 mission where all are together and actually needing to use their special individual talents for the team. Technically even when several are together all do not need to use their skills often. And with no finality like the closing C2 Paris mission it leaves one wondering about the story line. Very anti-climatic.

My final straw was when my puny orange auto-cover cone disappeared on all weapons for all commandos. I quit the game and uninstalled the thing. I ran this title on two machines with the same results. The second was way above the higher specs recommended.

So at $35-$50 now if you REALLY want this thing you should bite your lip and wait till its price drops significantly. Talk of a patch is interesting. To fix all the problems this game has it will need to be huge. A better idea is to recall all the games and begin again with a 2005 target date. C3 was yet another example of rushing an unfinished product out for the Christmas retail rush.

My final, final straw was several attempts at reinstalling the game to get some screen shots. I had dumped it from my HD and deleted registry references. Upon reinstall attempts it would not install the com3.exe file. All screens here are from the game site.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda been a great game

This game is a perfect illustration of what consumers hate most—feeling as though they are unwitting beta testers paying for the privilege.

Resources

Articles:

• 1998/07/23: Commandos Review
• 2001/10/30: Commandos 2: Men of Courage Review
• 2003/12/06: Commandos 3: Destination Berlin Review

Files:

• Playable Demo [220 MB]

Official Sites:

• Commandos 2: Men of Courage Official Site
• Commandos 3: Destination Berlin Official Site

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