Games like Commandos: a guide to real-time stealth tactics

There is no agreed name for this kind of game. The label on most store pages is real-time tactics, which is accurate and also covers Door Kickers, a game about clearing buildings with a police team. Players say commandos-like, which works only if you already know the game it points to. Search for stealth tactics and you mostly get stealth games with one character in them.

A reader who cannot name the thing cannot search for it, so this page names it: real-time stealth tactics, defined by the rules below. Very little here is a clone. Most games keep some of the rules and drop others, so the list is sorted by what each one keeps.

Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines set the form in 1998, and its page in the Influences section covers how. Six rules define it as this page uses the term.

Pyro Studios made the original. Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines was followed by the expansion Beyond the Call of Duty in 1999, Commandos 2: Men of Courage in 2001 and Commandos 3: Destination Berlin in 2003. All four were published by Eidos Interactive, and all four keep every rule.

Which one to start with is a question of age, not quality. The 2020 HD Remaster of Commandos 2 reworks the controls, the interface and the tutorial, and that list says where the 2001 original is hardest on a new player. The rules hold up. The interfaces date.

Commandos: Strike Force, in 2006, is the exception. Pyro Studios made it and Eidos published it, for Windows, PlayStation 2 and Xbox. It is a first-person shooter. It keeps the name and the Second World War setting and leaves out the overhead camera the rest of the line is built on, so it is a poor answer to the question this page asks.

The name came back in 2025. Commandos: Origins, from Claymore Game Studios and published by Kalypso Media, came out on 9 April 2025 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S. It is a prequel with six specialists and two-player co-op, and the first new game in the isometric form under that name since 2003. Reception was mixed, with a Metacritic score of 71. Reviews that liked it praised a balance of the classic form and modern streamlining. Reviews that did not called it overdesigned, with so many mechanics that improvisation is squeezed out.

Mimimi Games, a German studio, made the three games that brought the form back. Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun (2016, published by Daedalic Entertainment) moves it to feudal Japan with a cast of five. Desperados III (2020, published by THQ Nordic) is a Wild West game and a prequel to Spellbound's original Desperados. Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew (2023, self-published) is a pirate story with supernatural abilities.

Shadow Tactics and Desperados III are the closest to the six rules, and Metacritic gives them 85 and 86 on PC. Both draw guard vision as cones, and both let you pause, line up an action for each character and set them off together. Shadow Gambit bends the first rule. You recruit a crew over the campaign, missions can be played in any order, and the magic loosens what a cast member can do. It also scored 85.

On 29 August 2023, twelve days after Shadow Gambit came out, Mimimi announced it was winding down. The founders said Shadow Gambit would be the studio's final game and that they would be slowly ramping down over the following months. The reason they gave was the toll that a decade and a half of increasingly ambitious games had taken on them and their families.

Spellbound, a German studio, made the earliest copies. Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive (2001, published by Infogrames) put the form in the Wild West. You can look at any enemy to see its field of vision as a colour-coded cone, which is the third rule stated as a feature. Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood (2002) is the same idea in medieval England, with up to five characters, and keeping your kill count low is how you recruit more allies. Desperados 2: Cooper's Revenge followed in 2006, published by Atari.

Partisans 1941 (Alter Games, published by Daedalic Entertainment, 2020) puts Soviet partisans in the field and makes scavenging weapons from the dead part of the loop. Metacritic scored it 74. War Mongrels (Destructive Creations, 2021 on PC) is an Eastern Front game whose own description points to Commandos and Desperados as the model.

Door Kickers (KillHouse Games, 2014) and Door Kickers 2: Task Force North, which entered early access in November 2020 and was fully released in February 2025, keep real time and the pause for planning, and drop the patrol puzzle. The job is entering a building, not getting past a guard. It is the clearest case of the label real-time tactics covering a different game.

These share a mood with the form and not the form itself. Each has one character or plays in turns, which removes the first or the fifth rule.

IO Interactive's Hitman games are third-person and have one character, which makes them a different form. What they share with Commandos is the level: a hand-built place full of routines you can study, where the player is expected to watch before acting and can be undone by a body found at the wrong moment.

The World of Assassination trilogy is Hitman (2016, Square Enix), Hitman 2 (2018, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment) and Hitman 3 (2021, IO Interactive). In January 2023 Hitman 3 was renamed Hitman: World of Assassination, with content from the earlier two games folded into it.

Steam sells Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, Beyond the Call of Duty, Commandos 2 and Commandos 3, singly and as a Commandos Pack. The first game was written for Windows 98 and ME, and it shows. Players on the Steam forums report DirectX errors, a missing-file error and a game that runs far too fast on Windows 10.

The fix reported there: open the game's install folder, right-click its executable (the file name is spelled Comandos), open Properties, and on the Compatibility tab run it in Windows 95 mode with reduced colour mode set to 16-bit. The game then runs in a window, up to 1024 by 768, not full screen. That is a community workaround, not a patch, and it has not been tested here on Windows 11.

GOG sells Commandos 2 and 3 together as one DRM-free pack and lists Windows 10 as its supported system. The lower-friction route is the HD Remasters of Commandos 2 (January 2020) and Commandos 3 (August 2022), both published by Kalypso Media.

RAD Tactics is a squad tactics game for Windows PC, played in real time with pause, set in a post-apocalyptic world of zombies and rival factions. It is in development and made in Unity. That puts it in the family this page describes. We have not announced how any of the six rules apply to our game, and this page does not say.