For those of you that get a bit of déjà vu when looking at Commandos: Strike Force, you might need reminding that it's the spiritual successor to the Commandos series, the previous instalment of which was the insanely hard Commandos 2: Men of Courage. If you could cope with the difficulty, the appeal of this war game was the usage of a distant, pseudo overhead perspective that gave you a bird's eye view of the battlefield and a huge host of in-game options that made it something of a unique and realistic feeling war game. Strike Force takes a lot of those aspects, but adopts a typical first person viewpoint, and while this does serve to immerse you into the action, it also serves to put Strike Force up against a whole host of seasoned war game veterans that make for pretty tough competition.

The storyline is your typical heroic affair, instead of one man against the world it's a team of three - the Green Beret, Sniper and Spy, and the action begins in France. The story is unremarkable and very similar to the crowd, little more than a paper-thin excuse to throw you from one mission and scenario to the next. The characters are very two-dimensional as well, and you never really grow to like any of them - well, perhaps our cheeky Cockney sniper, who is voiced in quite an amusing fashion, but the unspectacular game engine ruins all the cut scenes with mouths that simply flap open and shut completely out of sync with the voice acting, worse than a cheaply dubbed Japanese movie. There's no attempt to form letters either, it's just a case of jaws moving up and down. While this isn't something that affects the gameplay, it is certainly very shoddy and unprofessional, and a lot less than we've come to expect at this stage of gaming's development.

The competent graphics engine does just about create an atmosphere and provide some vaguely interesting moments in the game, but it really is a case of seen it all before and seen it done better and more exciting. There's a reasonable amount of detail to the scenery, the animation of soldiers running, shooting and dying is okay and the weapons, uniforms and vehicles all look authentic to the time period, but you can't help but feel under whelmed by it all, as if you were expecting a Sergeant to report for duty, only to find you've got a wet behind the ears recruit instead. The sound is a bit better - gunfire is meaty, explosions rock the screen and blur your vision, engines roar and people scream as they die, so this does help the atmosphere some. I was intimately familiar with Strike Force's main orchestral theme weeks before I played the game, because I'm a huge fan of Battlestar Galactica on Sky One and Strike Force has been sponsoring it for a while - the music is rousing and memorable, injecting more interest into the proceedings than the graphics.

Regardless of how it all looks and sounds, Strike Force's gameplay is a really mixed bag of engaging missions followed by frustrating and tiresome ones, or sometimes with aspects of both bundled into a single mission. The first few missions are pretty short and serve as a useful tutorial to get you used to the unique aspects of our three heroes, after which they range from incredibly long and involved to surprisingly short, with coming up to twenty missions making up the whole single player campaign. As you would expect, most missions feature multiple objectives and include optional secondary objectives that count towards your overall score and rating upon completion of the mission. Objectives include the usual range of killing Nazis, assassinating leaders, destroying emplacements and vehicles, rescuing allies, sabotaging equipment and stealing secret documents or other important items.

Where the gameplay in Strike Force differs to all the rest, is in the abilities of your team. The Green Beret is the most unremarkable of the three; he's the muscle, able to use a range of heavy machine guns, shotgun, rocket launchers, grenades, anti-tank mines and so on. The Sniper is slightly more interesting - he can hold his breath to create a nice slow motion, slightly blurry effect as your heartbeat pounds in your ears and you line up and pull the trigger for that head shot, plus he can use throwing knives for close-quarters silent kills. The Spy steals the show however, as well as stealing Agent 47's biggest trick from the Hitman series. Using a piece of wire to strangle enemies from behind, he can then take their uniforms and hide in the open. Anyone of a lower rank will not recognise you, while higher ranks spot you instantly and equal ranks are suspicious, meaning that you can walk past them, but you'd better do it quickly, before they rumble your cover. The spy also has a silenced pistol and enjoys using gas grenades.

Most missions only give you access to one or two of the team, which does definitely make for a varied experience - blasting your way through waves of Nazis on one level and sneaking around strangling them on the next. While the gunplay aspect of the game fails to really excite, there is something quite appealing about sneaking around under the noses of your enemy, strangling them one by one, until an entire regiment is dead! Throwing reality out of the window, you have an on-screen radar that shows you the location of all nearby enemies, which way they are facing and even their status (green for normal, yellow for suspicious and red for trying to kill you). The rank of each enemy is also displayed when you look their way as the spy, so you can tell whether or not you can approach them without having to recognise their uniform.

While this is a useful mechanic in the game, it does somewhat counter the attempt to take a realistic and strategic approach to gameplay - however, what's far worse is that you cannot move the bodies of your victims, but must simply wait for about thirty seconds until they fade away into nothing. If you're going to go the Hitman route, surely it's better for the bodies to stay in place until you pick them up and hide them? It really does ruin the tension at times, to know that soon enough the bodies will vanish and you don't have to worry about patrolling troops discovering your presence through the bodies of their fallen comrades. Another daft thing - you can throw a coin to distract the enemy, causing them to look the other way for a moment. Fair enough. But you can stand in plain sight, lob the coin right past their stupid eyes and they still turn to see what made the noise!! Inconsistencies like this seem lazy and detract from the experience overall.

Still, if you can get past these issues and suspend your disbelief, working your way around sprawling levels packed full with dozens of Nazis of varying ranks, working out the best way to strangle them one by one, or perhaps gas a group of them, or take two out with your silenced pistol before they can call for help, is a lot of fun. It's a shame then that the nature of the gameplay on most of the levels is very much trial and error, and on those levels where you have to safeguard allies or defend a position, you'll find yourself failing over and over again, until you figure out the exact right sequence to pull off in time. The trial and error isn't such a big deal with the spy, although on levels where the alarm mustn't be raised, it can become a problem, but the gameplay for the majority of the experience feels very scripted and restricted, rather than free-roaming, and the fact that you're often limited to one character takes away a lot of your freedom of approach.

However, considering how useless the allied AI is, it's probably a blessing that you don't have all three characters to deal with on every level - because while you're not controlling one character, they basically do little more than stand there and get wounded, forcing you to stop what you're doing and get over there to heal them. Your allies are useless at taking cover, which is a real pain on levels where you're not allowed to lose all your comrades in battle, and the computer control of the other Strike Force member ranges from non-existent to abysmal, meaning that you basically need to leave them in a safe place, in cover, before you switch to the other character.

This is particularly frustrating on a level about halfway through the game, where the Nazis assault a village you've taken and there is so much to try and deal with that you just end up dying repeatedly until you finally get it right - you have lots of allies but you feel like you have to do everything yourself; take out the soldiers on the gangplanks at the base of the bridge, snipe the scouts ordering artillery strikes on you, blow up the oncoming armoured car and tanks, fend off the boats coming across the river, plus heal your allies and the other Strike Force member when they inevitably get injured. It really is the biggest chore of a level in the whole game, nothing but tiresome frustration, and it's not the only level that plays that way either.

While the appeal of the single player campaign is relatively limited and short-lived, online it's even worse - if you can actually find anybody to play with! Ten levels for Deathmatches for up to eight players, reduced to a choice of eight levels for Team Deathmatch and a pitiful two levels for Sabotage, which at least attempts to be different by using the Spy to interrogate wounded enemies and get the enemy's code, allowing access to their base, where you plant a bomb. It's all very run of the mill and eclipsed by far more great shooters, WWII based and otherwise, than I possibly have time to mention.

Commandos: Strike Force does have some unusual ideas that it brings to the war first person shooter, such as peeking through keyholes and sneaking around strangling Nazis while dressed as one of them, but it's simply not enough to earn it a promotion through the ranks, not with so many great shooters out there. In a flooded genre, the visuals, audio, missions and gameplay are not out of the ordinary enough to keep your interest, and there are plenty of better games to play online too. It gets a reasonable score because it's a reasonable game - but ask yourself, are you really willing to settle for just plain reasonable when there are so many awesome games out there?

Reviewed by Geoff Holland for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).