Commandos: Origins brings a Hitman-esque redesign to a long-lost PC classic

To say it’s been a long road to Commandos: Origins would be an understatement. The last time we had a new Commandos game, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of The King was in theaters. Meteora by Linkin Park was tearing up the album charts, and the closest thing the world had to social media was screaming while watching football with your mates.

Now, for the first time since 2003’s Commandos 3: Destination Berlin, the PC-centric stealth series is preparing to airdrop players behind enemy lines once again.

When Tropico publisher Kalypso acquired the dormant Commandos license in 2018, it founded developer Claymore Games with one goal in mind—to be the ultimate Commandos studio. Helmed by Anno series veteran Jürgen Reusswig, the entire team is composed of an elite squad of Commandos obsessives. The goal? To make the once-niche strategy series bigger and better than ever.

Sitting with Reusswig and Level Designer Gregor Frankenberg behind closed doors at Gamescom, the first thing that strikes me about Commandos: Origins is just how similar it feels to IO Interactive’s Hitman. Sending a top secret trio of (you guessed it) commandos into Nazi-occupied Guernsey, the large-scale map bursts with tactical possibilities as the camera pans over the heavily-fortified isle.

As a kid, I used to relish spending hours setting up my toys in the garden, wasting the afternoon lining the plastic armies up for a fight that I rarely had time to reenact. Luckily for my wasted youth, Commandos: Origins feels like it brings your childhood soldiers to life, sending them crawling slowly across a hostile environment as you use their various abilities to lure out unsuspecting enemies. Environmental interactions are plentiful, from shooting an explosive barrel to trigger a wider explosion, to crushing unsuspecting guards with falling rocks, or even loosing piles of wood on a nearby patrol. There are plenty of ways to murder Nazis that won’t raise the suspicion of other guards.

“Commandos: Origins gives you a lot of freedom,” says Frankenberg. “We are really bringing the retro tactics gameplay from the old Commandos into a totally fresh, modern environment. The old game had some freedom, but not to the extent that we're offering here. Now you can choose different ways to approach the mission—just geographically, by how the levels are built, or from the objectives side where there are many different ways to solve each mission.”

In addition to multiple sub-objectives to complete, Claymore promises that there will be various collectables hidden throughout each map, providing a replay incentive alongside the series' classic mission-grading system.

The Guernsey mission I’m shown has three controllable commandos, with a maximum of six under your command in other levels. Each soldier has their own character-specific abilities, and completing your objectives and extracting in one piece will require tactically switching between your troupe.

The Green Beret can climb things and bury himself under dirt, making him ideal for getting the drop on enemies and taking guards down with his blade. The Sapper works wonders with explosives, allowing him to set up all manner of delightfully devious traps. The Marine can swim and even use an inflatable dinghy, allowing him to flank the base and approach from a different entry point. Still, not content with just a cool little boat, Commandos’ very own Scuba Steve also comes equipped with a harpoon and a throwing knife, allowing the Marine to pull off silent kills at range—with the trade-off that he has to retrieve said weapons.

As stealth is the name of the game here, there is of course an alert system. Each map’s alarm has three different levels, and triggering said alarm three times puts the entire map on high alert, sending the entire might of the island outpost charging towards your unlucky unit.

There are a wealth of different enemy types to outwit, too. Guards, for example, are more observant than your standard soldier, and while regular soldiers can be easily lured, guards do not leave their post at any point. Officers will be more cunning than their lowly grunts, and snipers…well, I'm sure you can figure that one out.

In many ways, Commandos is a series that was ahead of its time. Released alongside accessible strategy fare like Age of Empires and Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Commandos always felt like the genre’s brutally challenging outlier in an era where difficulty was on the decline. With the massive success of series like Dark Souls and the popularity of punishing roguelikes, the 4K era feels built for the resurgence of this brutally challenging tactics series.

Each mission in Commandos: Origins supports its own individual difficulty setting—but the series' famed difficulty is there if you want it. If you're really a glutton for punishment, you can even opt to complete each mission non-lethally, meaning that you have to complete objectives quickly before your previously downed enemies suddenly wake up.

But while the difficulty remains in Commandos: Origins, the frustration has lessened. The big change? Everything feels refreshingly readable.

“UX didn’t exist in the ‘90s,” quips Reusswig. “The user experience—meaning controls, UI, that kind of stuff—was really important to update to more modern standards. The classic Commandos experience wasn't particularly user-friendly. That was one of the biggest points we wanted to improve on, and it's why our UI also feels a lot more modern than the rest of the visuals that more closely resemble the classic world.”

In a nice touch, you can now zoom all the way into the action,  showing off the high quality character models and animations, allowing players to witness their clever tactics play out in full fidelity. Indoor gameplay, which used to require hefty immersion-breaking loading, now switches seamlessly between the outdoors and the interiors on the same map.

Yet the feature I’m most excited for in Commandos: Origins is its two player co-op. Available both locally and online, two players can team up to coordinate their assaults and complete these taxing missions together. If you’re playing on PC, one player can even use a controller while the other uses the keyboard, should you so choose. It’s a genuinely novel addition to a traditionally lonely genre. Be it Hitman or Desperados, tactics games are usually solitary affairs, so being able to divide and conquer and put the "team" into team tactics feels like an innovative step forward for the genre.

Commandos: Origins will feature 14 missions, I’m told, and completing the first six unlocks a new playable character. I’m briefly shown a few other locations towards the end of my demo, and they look as delightfully diverse as fans would expect. From sneaking your squadron across a vast desert to shuffling through the Arctic to steering a buggy across an airfield in Libya, each distinct map is a character in itself. I’m also shown some additional mechanical twists, with the duo teasing a series of tanks and fighter planes that can be hijacked, as well as briefly showing off the three additional commandos.

After an excruciating 21-year absence, somehow the hard-as-nails Commandos series has returned—and while I've only been shown a snapshot of what the reboot has to offer, there looks to be a refreshing amount of tactical possibilities awaiting players.

Commandos: Origins is set to release later this year on the Epic Games Store.