What happens when a Spanish studio condenses every WWII action‑film cliché, U‑boat sabotage, POW breakouts, cigar‑chomping berets, into a single isometric playground, then dares you to finish the whole affair without tripping a single alarm? (Spoiler: it involves more quick‑loads than coffee breaks and at least one keyboard hurled in righteous indignation.) Commandos 2: Men of Courage is at once comfortingly classical and gloriously bizarre. Classical because its bombed‑out Paris rooftops and snow‑caked Ardennes forests could headline a History‑Channel binge; bizarre because it treats enemy patrol patterns like the world’s most lethal clockwork toy. Underrated or overrated? Underrated in 2025, where half the stealth fandom thinks lineage begins and ends with Metal Gear Solid V or Hitman World of Assassination. Fundamental or trivial? Strip away its quick‑save crutch and it’s as essential to tactical design as yeast is to bread, only sometimes the loaf detonates in your face.
Historical Context
Late 2001 was gaming’s hormonal growth spurt. Diablo II had devoured entire hard drives, Max Payne turned bullet time into household slang, and Sony’s PS2 “Emotion Engine” was supposedly teaching polygons to feel. Over in arcades, Time Crisis 2 ruled the light‑gun cabinet, while my local XP Arcade, a neon cave wedged between a dry cleaner and a pizza joint, kept its PC “LAN station” on a timer: three quarters for fifteen minutes. Into that eclectic tech soup marched Pyro Studios of Madrid, fresh off the cult breakout Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines (1998) and its expansion Beyond the Call of Duty (1999). Publisher Eidos Interactive needed a prestige PC title to balance Lara Croft’s ageing PS1 skeleton, and Pyro had a pitch: take the original’s meticulous stealth puzzles, magnify them across ten sprawling, multi‑layered missions, and let players drive nearly every vehicle, climb almost every surface, and even send a bull terrier named Whiskey toddling through ventilation shafts with a whiskey flask strapped to his back.
Real‑time tactics in 2001 was a niche but lively genre. Myth II showed rag‑doll physics, Baldur’s Gate II made pausable micromanagement sexy, and Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive proved the spaghetti‑western stealth formula had legs. Meanwhile, glossier first‑person war games, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, hogged magazine covers with promises of “cinematic immersion.” Pyro’s rejoinder was not raw polygon count but mechanical breadth: drivable Kübelwagens, swimmable sewers, lock‑pickable lockers, and interactive props like cigarettes, pebbles, and snowballs that could lure guards with Looney‑Tunes predictability. The PC Gamer demo disc featured “First Snow,” a Belgian château tutorial where you could waste your entire session pelting Wehrmacht grunts with slush. I did, burning my 75‑cent LAN‑timer slot. Worth every penny.
Mechanics
At its core Commandos 2 is an isometric heist, but the loot is Nazi humiliation and the getaway vehicle might be a stolen Panzer IV. You command up to ten specialists, each with a kit so distinct I still sort their portraits by hex code. Green Beret Jack “Tiny” O’Hara brandishes a knife big enough to moonlight as a canoe paddle and can shimmy up telephone poles like a caffeine‑addled squirrel. Sniper Sir Francis T. “Duke” Woolridge fires the most cost‑prohibitive bullets in Europe. Marine James “Fins” Blackwood totes diving gear, an inflatable raft, and a harpoon gun suitable for surprise dockside abductions. Sapper Thomas “Fireman” Hancock lugs TNT and a Yorkshire accent thick as treacle. Thief Paul “Lupin” Toledo pick‑pockets everything short of national debt. Spy René “Spooky” Duchamp chain‑smokes, steals uniforms, and whispers “Pardon, monsieur” before ventilating kidneys. Rounding out the menagerie are Natasha the seductive sniper and Whiskey the flask‑fetching terrier, proof Pyro had a sense of humor about war.
Each environment looks hand‑painted then peeled into diorama layers: a Japanese aircraft carrier cross‑sectioned like a dollhouse, an Arctic submarine wedged in pack ice, a triple‑decked pagoda citadel in Burma. You can spin the camera 360°, zoom until propaganda posters pixelate, or pull back to calculate vision cones that radiate from guards like green flashlights of doom. The HUD crams radar, inventory Tetris, and line‑of‑sight overlays into one screen, turning every mission into NORAD meets open‑heart surgery. Yet once rhythm sets in, pause, chain orders, un‑pause, pray, F5 quick‑save, you start to feel like a puppet master pulling strings on a parade of oblivious sentries.
The game’s pulse is the cross‑discipline combo. Picture Green Beret silently kazoo‑ing a guard into the bushes, where he plants a decoy cigarette. Spy loots the corpse’s duds, struts past an officer, drops chloroform in a pillbox, signals the Thief through a keyhole. Lupin wriggles under floorboards, steals safe codes, slides them up a dumbwaiter to the Sniper, who extinguishes a floodlight with one overpriced shot. Meanwhile Sapper belly‑crawls under a half‑track to attach TNT while the Marine surfaces from a drainage ditch, harpoon primed. Ten clicks later: synchronized boom, alarm lamps dark, objective completed, enemy morale currently vacationing in Antarctica. When it works, the auditory payoff pops like bubble wrap laced with C‑4.
Of course, your first attempt never flows that smoothly. Maybe you forget guard dogs sniff further than humans see, or you step one pixel off a climbable ledge and drop into a searchlight’s embrace. The game is less twitch reflex and more iron memory: each death scribbles a mental sticky note, “Avoid creaky wooden planks near drunk officer; they squeak louder than gravel in a blender.” If Hotline Miami is “learn rhythm through carnage,” Commandos 2 is “write doctoral thesis on patrol patterns, then maybe succeed.”
AI strikes a tightrope between razor clever and convenience stupid. Troops chase tossed cigarette packs like moths to flame yet notice footprints in snow if you sprint. Officers pierce Spy disguises unless you salute, but they’ll gladly chit‑chat with “Heinrich the Mechanic” ten seconds after Heinrich vanished. That’s Cinematic Stupidity: believable enough to thrill, lenient enough to avoid puzzle stalemate.
Some missions include escort work, infamous in tactics circles. Thankfully there are only three mandatory escort segments across the ten main operations, yet each one turns pathfinding into interpretive dance. TNT charges are easier to juggle than POWs who decide a scenic stroll through searchlights is patriotic. Quick‑save was invented for moments like these.
Legacy and Influence
Commercially, Commandos 2 posted solid numbers, just shy of one million copies worldwide by 2006, and propelled Pyro toward experiments like Praetorians. Critically it hovered near 90 percent yet found itself overshadowed by flashier first‑person shooters. Still, its blueprint crept everywhere. Splinter Cell prototypes borrowed line‑of‑sight UI. Mimimi’s Shadow Tactics, Desperados III, and Shadow Gambit are open love letters, translating class‑based stealth to Edo Japan, the Wild West, and undead Caribbean respectively.
So why didn’t Pyro ride a longer wave? Partly timing: the dot‑com implosion rattled Spanish studios, and Eidos shifted marketing muscle to Lara’s PS2 reboot. Partly complexity: console ports swapped hotkeys for radial wheels, the ludic equivalent of performing brain surgery in oven mitts. A 2020 HD Remaster tried modernizing assets but arrived bug‑ridden and controversially censored, sending purists back to the 2002 executable with community widescreen mods.
Beyond measurable ripples lies Commandos 2’s knack for emergent failure drama. A botched sapper charge spirals into hostage improv; a missed sniper shot triggers ten minutes of sewer hide‑and‑seek; a forgotten uniform sends your Spy scuttling through vents like a nicotine‑addled rat. Rogue‑likes tout such stories as procedural miracles; Pyro pulled it off with deliberate design, no dice rolls required.
Closing Paragraph + Score
Running Commandos 2 on a 2025 rig requires a no‑CD patch, a fan‑made 4K wrapper, and enough grey matter to juggle 30 hotkeys. Yet when the title fanfare swells and O’Hara mutters, “This’ll be a cinch,” muscle memory snaps back like elastic. Isometric art still dazzles, revealing background gags I missed in 2002 (pretty sure a POW is sneak‑puffing behind the latrine). And nothing beats the endorphin rush of chain‑executing a plan so clean the map looks gift‑wrapped, not battlefield‑scarred.
Score? 9.0 / 10. Deduct a full point for those three escort nightmares and for the occasional invisible grid that blocks Tiny from vaulting a knee‑high fence. Add nine for audacity, for whiskey‑brandy doggo delivery systems, for letting me swivel a battleship cannon and vaporize its former owners. Commandos 2 remains a Rube‑Goldberg contraption of bayonets, chewing gum, and tactical brilliance, absurd, fragile, and wildly satisfying once every cog clicks. Now if you’ll excuse me, the Sniper’s down to his last bullet and I need to test whether snowball distractions still fool a Wehrmacht officer. Don’t tell OSHA; they’d revoke my quick‑save privileges.