Commandos: Strike Force [PS2]

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Eidos isn't going to get away with using Jason Statham (or a guy who sounds just like him) to sucker us in this time. Commandos was once a rigorously demanding isometric strategy war title with intricately rendered locations and a half-dozen character classes. Commandos: Strike Force is an entirely different beast, a limp first-person shooter that forgoes strategy and adaptability for linear play. The voice acting may be great, but that doesn't disguise that there are half as many characters, and half as much fun.

Right off the bat, the restructuring is evident. Instead of six possible soldiers, you'll have only three: a sniper, an espionage expert, and a green beret. Much like previous entries in the series, Strike Force drops players into a hostile environment. In this case, Nazi-occupied France. Through a combination of stealth, disguise, and brute strength, the three-man strike force will complete a grab bag of missions and bring freedom to at least a small corner of the world.

Players have a choice between characters at almost any time, and between the order of mission completion as well. There's some degree of strategy to the mission order, though in the end it really didn't seem to make much difference. And within each mission there's a sad lack of flexibility compared to what the series used to offer.

Commandos has always been a game of stealth and planning. We routinely wouldn't make a move without exhaustively examining how the guards move and the overall area layout. Here, too often it seemed that creeping forward and taking out guards in order was enough to move forward. At times, the AI required a bit of quick thinking, especially when an SS officer saw through the spy's physical disguise. But more often than not we had no trouble with enemies at all, especially when we pulled out the sniper rifle for one-shot kills.

It's not entirely fair to compare Strike Force so rigidly to what's gone before, however, especially since its aims are so different. And it does begin to shine in a handful of sequences where events break open into all-out action. But those are relatively rare, and even when the bullets and mortars are flying, there's not enough of a sense of unique action. Even in the best moments we couldn't shake the similarity to other, better war shooters.