Commandos: Strike Force review

You and your chums parachute behind enemy lines and ninja your way into a German encampment. Using stealth and improvisation, your small team of commandos strike out at the pulsing heart of the Third Reich in an attempt to cripple it from within. With a little help from the French Resistance, you sink your squad deep within enemy territory and go to work sniping, strangling and sabotaging.

Commandos: Strike Force presents an elite team of three professional killers, each with his own specialization from sniping to espionage, but doesn't quite deliver on the strategic legacy of its predecessors. The Commandos series has long been celebrated as a uniquely tactical approach to the crowded WWII genre, but the newest episode wildly departs from this. The games evolution, or mutation, into a first-person shooter has crippled the strategic aspects that originally attracted gamers to the series.

Stripping the number of playable soldier classes down to a mere three (cut in half from the original six), Commandos: Strike Force focuses on stealth with Bill the sniper, O'Brien the green beret and Colonel Brown the spy. Each class has their own set of special abilities: the sniper can hold his breath to squeeze off flawless headshots or use knives at close range, the green beret wields dual automatic rifles and grenades; and the spy disguises himself in order to penetrate Nazi defenses without firing a shot. Unfortunately, the spy and sniper play remarkably similarly as both employ sneaking around as their primary weapon, while the green beret remains your basic dude-with-a-buncha-guns.