It wasn't long before both Commandos 2 and Praetorians reached their twentieth anniversary. Reason for Yippee! and Kalypso, to get the classics back on the shelves with HD remaster versions. But is a fresh cell cure enough to turn the aging real-time strategy games into competitive titles again? Or is it just drawing fans?
Before the Spanish development studio Pyro Studios turned its back on computer games and after the merger with Play Wireless completely specialized in applications for mobile devices, the boys and girls from Madrid delivered some successful and above all trend-setting titles. The two best-known games from this house are likely to be Commandos 2 and Praetorians, tactical games that still have large fan bases today.
In their day, almost 18 and 17 years ago, both were considered the best representatives of their genre and were showered with praise and awards. So it was only a matter of time before someone would remember the glory days of these classics and revamp them for today's market. That someone is the developer studio Yippee, which was bought by Team 17 in 2016 and has now launched the HD remaster with the help of Kalypso Media.
Commandos 2 HD Remaster
Let's start with Commandos 2: Men of Courage, a real-time tactical computer game that originally appeared on the PC in 2001 and is now from Yippee! received an optical revision. The sequel to Commandos: Behind enemy lines, a team of specialists sent you into enemy territory during World War II, where you had to master tasks that were largely classified as Ascension Command. Blows up the bridge on the Kwai, steals a stolen submarine … just the usual.
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The current Unity engine is used for the remaster, which allows the game to have a resolution of 4K and represents the eponymous commandos and their adversaries with a good three times as many polygons. These innovations ensure that the character models and their animations are particularly beautiful to look at. Compared to the original, the uniforms of the individual units can now be distinguished much better, which makes it easier, for example, to identify specialized enemies on the map.
Thanks to the stepless zoom, which was added in a first update, it is also possible to zoom out far enough and to get a better overview of the situation. This makes it much easier to keep an eye on your enemy and friend and to come up with the best strategy to achieve your goal. Since the missions correspond one to one to the original, there are still numerous ways to successfully complete the tasks.
Apart from this visual polish, nothing has changed in Commandos 2, of course, which has both positive and negative effects. Because even in times of XCOM 2, the tactical game is still one of the most demanding and tricky representatives of its kind, but is unnecessarily complicated and less intuitive when it comes to control. You have to handle a little sensitive mouse pointer and lots of hotkeys, while you can only rotate the map in a cumbersome way and only in four 90-degree steps.
Fans of the original who expect no more and no less than a graphically revised version of it should be satisfied with Commandos 2 HD Remaster. If you haven't had any contact with the game yet, it's probably better to stay away from it because the controls have not been revised and are at least as cumbersome as in 2001.
Because many control conventions that have been introduced in real-time strategy games in the past almost 20 years and have been standard since then are completely missing here. Even for veterans of the original, it takes a few missions to get used to the key assignment. Newcomers are likely to be strongly deterred from the start. The legendary multiplayer mode has also been dispensed with, which further reduces the appeal of this game.
Praetorians HD Remaster
Almost 17 years ago, the Praetorians first fought against Gauls, Egyptians and other enemies. Back then the game from Pyro Studios was considered one of the best of its kind, today it's hard to imagine why it was. Although the title inspires with many varied missions and an appealing game mechanic core, the controls have aged even worse than is the case in Commandos 2.
The fine-tuned rock-paper-scissor principle and the different roles that your units play in the missions have lost little of their charm, but the many small and large errors, which were incomprehensibly adopted from the original one to one the joy of playing quickly fades away. The behavior of the units is sometimes too confused, the logic behind some systems too confused.
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It is difficult to understand that archers can even mix up strong infantry or hail arrows from a thick forest in close combat, but enemy AI that does not respond to fire and enemy leaders who can be defenselessly slaughtered are unforgivable. So while you are busy on the one hand to familiarize yourself with the sometimes confused key assignment, you must also pay attention to the quirks of the game that can destroy your own tactics.
But especially from the level of difficulty normal, you can hardly make any mistakes in the planning, otherwise a clash with the enemy almost leads to defeat. This creates a lot of frustration, especially when you think you have taken everything into account, just to experience how the Roman army is simply not able to march at a uniform pace or in an orderly formation.
This degenerates into an extremely large amount of micromanagement, since you always have to make sure to correct the direction of view of the units by hand and to move sorted and numbered groups separately. If you have to do this a second or even a third time after a defeat, you will quickly reach the limits of your own nerve endurance. What still looked modern in 2003 only seems awkward and unnecessarily complicated today.
At least the graphics have been revised, even if only the bare minimum has been done in this case. Although the Unreal Engine 4 is used to present the game in a modern look, the result is rather below average. The lovelessly animated pixel battles often blur into a coarse graphic mash, the image is torn again and again and jerky occurs repeatedly.