Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines

Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines puts you in charge of six Allied specialists in the Second World War. Each mission drops them into an enemy-held position in occupied Europe or North Africa, with one objective to complete and a garrison many times their number. The six have different trades. The Green Beret climbs and uses a knife, the Sniper shoots from long range, the Sapper handles explosives, the Driver handles vehicles, the Marine swims, and the Spy walks among the enemy in a stolen uniform.

You play in real time, from an isometric view above the map, mostly with the mouse. Select a commando, click where he should go, and he goes, while the clock keeps running. Shooting is possible, but gunfire raises an alarm and one squad cannot win an open fight against a garrison. So you study the patrols, wait for a gap, remove one guard at a time out of sight, and hide the body before the next patrol finds it. Each level is closer to a puzzle than a battle, and it is rarely solved on the first try.

The decision that lasted was to show the player what the enemy can see. Ask the game about any soldier and it draws a cone on the ground in front of him, in two shades. In the lighter band, close in, he spots anything. In the darker band, farther out, he spots a commando only if he is standing upright. Crouching changes the answer. Whether a plan will work stops being a guess about hidden numbers and becomes something you can read, judge by eye, and be fairly blamed for getting wrong.

It did not invent stealth. Konami's Metal Gear, in 1987, was already built around avoiding guards rather than shooting them. What Commandos did was join that idea to a small squad of unlike specialists, real-time orders, and enemy perception drawn as a shape on the map instead of left for the player to infer. Pyro Studios, founded in Madrid in 1996, made it their first game. It sold more than a million and a half copies and became the most successful Spanish game of the decade, an unexpected result for a game this slow and this demanding.

The genre that followed borrowed the whole arrangement: a small squad of unlike specialists, enemies whose sight you can read, bodies that must be hidden, and quick saves as a normal part of play. Desperados, from the German studio Spellbound, carried it to the Wild West. Shadow Tactics, from Mimimi in 2016, carried it to feudal Japan, and its makers were open that Commandos was where they started. Games in this line are still answering the questions it asked.

RAD Tactics is a squad tactics game played in real time with pause, and it belongs to the family that Commandos helped establish. That is a statement of lineage, not a list of shared features, and we are not announcing here how any part of our game works. What Commandos proves is a principle: players will accept losing a whole squad, and will go back in, so long as the loss was fair. Fairness in this kind of game comes from the player being able to see what the enemy sees.

Any squad tactics game has to solve the problem Commandos solved: how the player knows why the plan failed. A squad that dies to something the player could not have known is not a hard game, it is an unreadable one. Commandos answered with information on the screen, and that answer has held for more than a quarter of a century. We treat it as a question every game in the genre owes the player an answer to, ours included.

Every level has a moment where the plan is working. The patrol has turned, the cone has swung off the path, and the Sapper is halfway across open ground with the Sniper covering him. Then a second guard steps out of a doorway you stopped watching, the cone lands on your man, and the alarm starts. Nobody cheated you. You find the thing you missed, load the save, and begin again, and it rarely feels unfair.

We also like how little it asks you to take on trust. There is no hidden rule to learn from a manual, only a map, six people and a guard's line of sight. When the plan fails, the cause is somewhere on the screen, and finding it is half the pleasure. The next attempt is better for it, which is why people kept going back in.