Commandos 2
The original Commandos was a surprise hit. Released in 1998, the World War II strategy game has sold more than a million copies worldwide. Not bad for a game so frustratingly hard that grown men have been reduced to tears when yet another meticulously planned sortie fails.
Aware of this problem, the developers promised to make Commandos 2 easier to play. Thankfully, this is the case, but it is all a matter of degree: C2 remains as tough, yet perversely enjoyable, as ever.
This time, the game expands into other theatres of the war, including the South Pacific, and throws in a couple of new characters to lead.
This allows for more variety, but it is still a game that calls for slow planning, quick thinking and a tortuous amount of trial and error. You can expect to spend six or seven hours even on the easiest skill setting before completing a level, and it is possible that less patient gamers will give up long before the war is won.
That would be a shame as there is plenty to admire here. War has never looked so good: it is hard to imagine how much better an isometric 3D environment can look, while you can now finally enter buildings and face the enemy indoors. There is also a pleasing amount of freedom when it comes to tactics, with no set way to achieve the goal.
Ultimately, however, Commandos 2 does not offer a great leap forward from the original. In fact, the difficulty level is still set too high, which tends to induce regular quick saves that detract from the atmosphere (after all, you would not get a second chance to sneak up on the guard in real life). But the graphical and gameplay improvements, and an unerringly convincing wartime environment, make this a convincing sequel. (GH)
Red Faction
Sony PlayStation 2 £44.99 Volition/THQ **
As videogames become ever more realistic in their graphical design, they can also suffer from increasing logical incoherencies. Take the normal behaviour of that action-game favourite, the rocket launcher. Countless games give you a weapon that fires enormous explosive projectiles which can detonate your enemies into showers of bloody chunks, yet for some reason do not even leave a mark on a little wooden door. It ruins the illusion of involvement in the game world.
Red Faction, a sci-fi first-person shooter, wants to change all that. Its "Geo-Mod" technology features real-time deformable environments.
In English, that means that if a heavily armoured personnel carrier is crossing a bridge, you can take out the bridge with a rocket. If a door will not open, you can blast your way through the wall at the side of it. Cool.
Anything you can see, you can blow up.
That is the theory. But sadly, it doesn't actually work like that. You can only blow up parts of the environment the designers have already decided are destructible. Try the wrong wall and you can fire hundreds of rockets without getting anywhere. Nice try, then, but no banana.
Red Faction casts you as a miner on Mars rebelling against the evil corporation that has enslaved you. The gameplay, heavily influenced by Half-Life, alternates all-out shooting with stealth, with the added attraction of fun vehicles to play with - submarine, driller, jeep, fighter spacecraft and so on.
Visually it is luminously striking and very smooth, although it works only within very well-defined aesthetic cliches - rocky caverns, brushed-steel facilities with whooshing doors and so on.
The sound design is wonderful, with a wide variety of subtle ambient noise working hard to build atmosphere.
But it also features too many annoying platform-jumping sections, infuriatingly inconsistent enemy artificial intelligence, and frequent load times that utterly disrupt the rhythm of play.
The only multiplayer option, meanwhile, is a disgracefully jerky two-person mode.
Overall, Red Faction feels frustratingly unfinished. It has some lovely ideas and impressive set-pieces, hobbled by a clutch of glaring faults. Somewhere in this ambitious, sprawling epic is a much tighter, more coherent game struggling to get out. (SP)
Anachronox
PC £39.99 Ion Storm/Eidos ***
Eidos's recent decision to close Ion Storm's Texas HQ indicates all is not well back at its million-dollar ranch. The developer's track record has been patchy at best, with two poor games (Daikatana and Dominion) just about balanced by the excellent Deus Ex.
The fourth game was once tipped to be another world beater, but all went quiet a few months ago and now the game arrives almost unannounced - usually a sign of trouble.
Despite visual similarities to Deus Ex, this is very much Final Fantasy with bigger boots: the same random battles, the same need to recruit allies (up to seven, albeit only up to three at once) and the same endless dialogue.
Surprisingly, not all of this is voiced, resulting in more on-screen text than you may have seen in a while. Still, if adventuring is your thing, your hero Sly Boots has six planets to visit as he tries to unravel why he was beaten up and thrown out of his own seedy office.
Anachronox keeps to a movie-like pace, with key events nicely animated but strangely predictable to anyone familiar with cyberpunk fiction. The battles are fun, with excellent use of the background to create steam-pipe firewalls and the like. However, if you don't like this form of stone/paper/scissors combat, nothing on display here will convince you.
My main problem with it is common to most graphic adventures, for example the tedious minor characters who stand around all day saying the same things - Shen Mue has proven that non-player characters can have interesting lives too.
Likewise, revisiting the same locations over and over, trying to make out something significant through the gloom (why are these games always so dark?), to say nothing of the constant stream of cliches borrowed from the Matrix and Dark City, suggests a game struggling to find its own style.
The end result is always playable, but not particularly exciting or appealing. Ion Storm's decision to try four different genres with its first four games, shows a developer taking on too much too soon. (MA)
