There’s an element original to the 2001 release which I am a bit surprised they didn't take the opportunity to revisit: the material surrounding Natasha, the game's sole female character. Like If/Then statements preserved in amber.
In that indifferent, inscrutable human engineering, the kind you find in adventure games from the same era: this character must use this object on that one, in this specific order, for reasons that are simply, impenetrably, encoded. Or like the bonus objectives in 2016’s Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun (a game very much in the Commandos tradition) which a guest on a podcast I was on summarized well: “This level is designed to train you to use this character’s skill…Don’t use that skill.”īut there’s a certain nostalgia in a game as particular as this. “Try giving the enigma machine to Natasha and letting her operate the radio,” was the sage advice of the old sherpa guides, and it worked.Īttuning myself once again to the rhythm of puzzle solving, I started to register this all as merely additional criteria, the kind that speedrunners and completionists impose on themselves on a lark. Even one instance where a cutscene wouldn’t trigger, causing a main objective to remain inoperable, turned out to only be the result of an abstruse conditional, reproduced two decades later. The inadequate instructions, the exploitable action-cancelling, the overpowered-to-the-point-of-being broken Guard mode…to hear them described by users in the early aughts, you could almost conflate them with features. But these archival dives showed that a healthy portion of the problems were old, known commodities. It put me in mind of that xkcd comic about the “wisdom of the ancients.” Often the bug was new, or at least, undocumented. A game is released, poorly it suffers the slings and arrows of a few thousand users on Metacritic or Steam and the reticent journalists’ “reviews-in-progress” (cowards), and the publisher promises a battery of quick patches.Įach new issue sent me desperately beachcombing through old forums and FAQs (bless this one in particular). This is ostensibly a problem for the critic. If this sounded like too egregious a problem to let stand, well…perhaps by the time you are reading this review it'll have already been remedied, and all that lavish metaphor up above will be null and void. And so suddenly there are new concerns overlayed across the game’s fictional matters of stealth and subterfuge: Where do I have to click on something to actually click it now? And how long must I compensate for this new discrepancy, until it changes again? The interface will throw these switch-ups at you at inopportune times: when you’re trying to duck one of your commandos just out of a Nazi’s sight, or fumbling to have them pick up a ticking time bomb.
But mouse over to anything on the periphery, and the capricious pointer comes back on a different side and some new distance apart from the anchoring one.
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