And so Pyro Studios basically made a double mistake: there are more commandos than the skills warrant, and the commandos are indistinct at best. Now it’s almost arbitrary which commando to use because they all have the skills necessary to do 90% of the work. To “fix” the problem, Pyro Studios allowed the commandos to share many more skills in Commandos 2 - like knocking out enemies, hiding bodies, shooting rifles, and using medkits - and while that makes the missions more convenient to play, it results in a new problem. In the original game, the commandos didn’t share many skills, but that resulted in a couple of them (the green beret and the spy) doing almost all of the work because they had the skills most important for playing the game. The seductress is just a combination of the sniper and the spy, the dog doesn’t do enough to be worthwhile (and only appears in a couple missions anyway), and the thief’s main skill could have been given to somebody else (like, say, the nearly useless driver).Plus, Pyro Studios made a philosophical change with the commandos. More commandos sounds good, but it’s here more than anywhere else that Pyro Studios added stuff to the sequel that they didn’t need to. So in addition to the original six, you get to control a thief, who can pick open locks, a seductress, who can wear disguises and shoot sniper rifles, and a dog, who can distract enemies. Six of those commandos - the green beret, the sniper, the diver, the sapper, the driver, and the spy - are back from the original game, but three are new.
There’s even a mission that gives a nod and then some to the movie Saving Private Ryan (little did Tom Hanks know he was playing a commando).To complete the missions, you get to control up to nine commandos. There are 22 missions in all - two training missions, ten real missions, and ten (short and sometimes silly) bonus missions - and their objectives range from disabling planes on an aircraft carrier to rescuing prisoners from a castle to stealing an Enigma machine from a German U-boat.
It takes place during the heart of World War 2, and it allows you to guide teams of commandos on raids against German and Japanese bases. Fortunately, while SMD can often be fatal to the sequel (if not the developer), Pyro Studios managed to make Commandos 2 fun to play despite the extra level of complexity, and it ends up being just as good as the original.Commandos 2, like its predecessor, is a squad-based real-time strategy game. There are even more ways of viewing the game’s world.
As a result, Commandos 2 has everything that Commandos had, plus more: more commandos, more abilities, more equipment, more objectives, and more enemies. Well, evidently Pyro Studios became infected with SMD when developing Commandos 2: Men of Courage, the sequel to 1998’s Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines.
It only strikes at game developers, and although its vector of contamination is unknown, its symptom is always the same: when the infected developer decides to make a sequel, it takes the core gameplay from the original product and then adds a whole lot of stuff to it - even if that stuff isn’t needed or beneficial.
If you’re like most people, then chances are you’ve never heard of Sequel Maker’s Disease (SMD).