verdict
The problems inherent in stealth games prevent the origin of the command, but it’s still a high stake, high-intensity RT where even the smallest action can feel meaningful. It’s meticulous, difficult and demanding, and tests your patience as much as tactical insights, but when you finally get it right, the origin of the command is rewarding.
Whether it’s Metal Gear Solid, Sprinter Cell, Assassin’s Creed, Thief, or other genre Titan, stealth games all suffer because of the same paradox. It is the tension between being theoretical and the actual thing. You are the world’s largest secret agent. You are a superhuman hitman. With instinct, intelligence, motor skills and cutting-edge equipment, even the most secure enemy bases can infiltrate, complete your targets, and return without anyone knowing you are there. That’s the pretend. The reality is a trial-and-error conflict. Quick save. You’ll try something. The alarm goes off. You will be killed. Quick Road. You will try something else. The alarm goes off. and so on.
Although characters in stealth games are assumed to be efficient and elegant, the structure and mechanics of these games mean that moments of true elegance and refinement are rare and usually follow clumsy experiments for a few minutes. Command Origins, which marks the return of the classic RTS game series (remastered or unloved FPS spinoff Strike Force) in 22 years, is unfortunately no exception. But that’s still a good thing and puts a strain on the principles of stealth games, but it’s a great showcase of high stakes strategies on a low scale.
It was early in World War II, and the famous Commandos units have not yet been fully assembled. Starting with only Green Berets, gradually joining sappers, snipers, marines, spies and drivers throughout the campaign over 20 hours. Each has a different abilities – the sapper can cut barbed wire. Marines can swim underwater. The spy has a silent Luger, and by combining them, they secretly complete the mission that sinks into the way deep within the German boundaries. Origins’ pace is much slower, especially compared to the old Commandos trilogy, the first game. Each level takes 2-3 hours, including retrieval and quick load. The map is huge and there are so many enemies that need to be carefully planned and executed by every forward step.
It’s a great moment to start the mission first, zoom out and see how many soldiers and paw sent stand between you and your target. At first, it all seems impossible. There are early levels where you need to infiltrate and blow up the fort, and all routes of the invasion are covered with enemy patrols, fixed machine guns and gate checkpoints. There are two men, a green beret and a sniper, and the amount of ammunition is just very limited. Still, two hours later, you can zoom out and see either dozens of Nazis are dead or unconscious, and abandoned fort. Somehow you did it. However, the origin of the command is satisfactory for now.
The levels are in the final hours, but they are informally separated into dozens of small tasks. All the courtyards you have to cross, the buildings you have to penetrate, and the power lines you have to interfere with represent a mini-strategy game in itself. Beyond the early tutorial levels and some tooltips, you’re yourself. Press the tab and become a professional. This is the rhythm of the game. Enter the new area, see how many security guards there are, take in and take in possible routes and begin investigating. It may seem inexplicable – security guards have all cross passes, their gazes crossed, too many open grounds.
But once you start the experiment – press Quick Save and see if you can successfully crawl onto the canvas pile before someone spins and spots you. He sticks a knife on one of his guards and tries to pull his body back indoors before his friend comes back. A plan begins to form. Playing the origins of command is like cutting through a solid piece of marble into a sculpture. Start with this rockless monolithic block at this level, but by carving it here and brushing it a few hours later, you can look back and see what you’ve created.
The spirit of the origin of commands is contained in its command mechanics. You hit the shift and the game freezes. Next, one man is assigned a separate order. Instruct the nearest security guard to place the chokehold on the green beret. Now everyone is ready. Press Enter to perform all these actions in sync. Make it right, and although it feels almost musical or barrageous, there is a thick tension of atrocity. The pebbles hit the ground. The guard turns his back. His friend Yelps and turns over. A whispered gunshot. Another sample. And it ended in a few seconds.
Reaching the end of a mission is almost a feeling other than the point. The thrust of the origin of the command is in failure and retry, fail and retry, fail and retry, until you can perform the perfect tactical operation. It may have taken 30 minutes of real time, but we reached one side of the courtyard to the other, eliminating all the guards and no one saw things.
It’s a minimum scale RTS game. In Command and Conquest and Starcraft, after 30 minutes, they built the entire base, fed a battalion of tanks, and defeated the entire army. In the origin of the command, you crossed the street. It’s meticulous and refreshing, but sometimes it feels too slow and too accurate. Rather than calculating brilliant, bold and tactical masterstrokes often, they simply oppose the game’s noisy system. The difference between the alarm trigger and the invisible difference can be the millimeter of the guard’s vision cone. When you try to tell one commando to be adjacent to the right and the other command to go left, you’re running both in the same direction as you don’t properly configure the strict menu of the game.
Many of your quick loads are products of accidental habits in your soldier’s actions, or the unsupported mechanical routines of the enemy. The original Metal Gear Solid remains the biggest stealth game, not only because its style, aesthetics and performance, but also the simplicity of the system, walking on predictable routes, with clear lines of sight and become very visible on the Soliton Radar. Command Origins is more than a stealth game, it’s a tactical game – but at its worst, it feels like it’s overdesigned, as the rich mechanics squeeze out improvisation and raw energy.
That’s a problem with this genre. The origin of command is made in the spirit of war films and boys’ own adventures, but it means that stealth games and, to a lesser extent, strategy games often feel like deconstruction, system logic, and patience. It’s a great setup – it’s always been – but the actual experience of command is hard and inorganic. It does not capture the energy of the premise. It’s like stubbornness compared to a spreadsheet that includes game programming.
But reconcile with that — and the fact that the gorgeous click crack backpack menu system of the old game has been replaced by mediocre (obviously easy to read) icons — and the origin of the command is still good. Regardless of how transparent the system is, and the amount of extreme quick savings and quick loading you have to do, it’s a very difficult game, and it feels important, even the smallest action, and even meaningful.
