Gamescom 2024: Commandos: Origins Impressions

The huge Xbox stand this year wasn’t without a few strategy games, and among them we also found a representative of the real-time tactics genre – Commandos: Origins. The famous WWII series will return later this year, and a twenty-minute demo was available at Gamescom.

I want to say right away that I have no experience with the Commandos series, largely due to the fact that the first three volumes came out before I was born. But thanks to the now sadly defunct German studio Mimimi and their games like Shadow Tactics, Desperados 3 and Shadow Gambit, I really liked the genre.

The demo immediately threw me into one of the missions, where individual mechanics were gradually introduced. Initially, I entered the role of a Green Beret, who has a fairly standard arsenal such as a pistol, a grenade, or a radio to lure enemies.

Outflanking your enemies and taking them out as stealthily as possible is the most fun part of the genre, and Commandos: Origins does it brilliantly. There are a lot of options, and I only got to try out two characters in the entire demo. In addition to their abilities, the use of the environment is also important, such as incendiary barrels or crates that can be dropped on soldiers.

Of course, the event needs to be carefully planned and, if possible, carried out according to plan, which is not always possible. And when this happens, the worst part of the game begins. During the demo, I got into a shootout about three times, and it all seemed very chaotic. But what struck me most was that once I managed to hide, the enemies very quickly stopped looking for me and everything went back to normal.

And here I come to the problems of the whole game, which are not that few, but almost all of them concern technical processing, far from the quality of the already mentioned games from Mimimi. Graphically, this is not a very attractive game, not only in terms of the visual effects themselves, but especially the animation, which looks very ugly, and sometimes you are not even sure whether you have encountered a bug or how it is supposed to look. For example, when the character dived into the mud and began to move, the animation stopped altogether.

It’s hard to say how much of this is due to the fact that I was playing the game on a console, specifically an Xbox dev kit. Not only are the gamepad controls completely unsuitable for this genre and often made things difficult for me, but the game also ran at 30 FPS, which I don’t think is justified given the level of graphics and the genre as a whole. So I was very surprised to hear that the game would be coming to last-gen consoles as well.

Overall, I was left with mixed feelings after playing the Commandos: Origins demo. The gameplay is very fun and works well in stealth mode. However, it is hindered by outdated technical processing, which, in addition to bugs and weaker graphics or animation, also manifests itself in annoying autosaves at almost every stage, interrupting the game. But if you like the series and can forgive such flaws, then you will definitely not be disappointed.

Commandos: Origins is coming to PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. The title will be released later this year.