it's one buggy mess.. you have to be prepared to constantly fight the engine. but all in all its fun to play

probably too hard for the average player. lots of necessary stealth in the first sections of the game. but your characters have very little skills to use stealth opportunities. very low differentiation between classes at first game gets easier as you play.

probably would have worked better as a turn based game. there's a lot of enemies here and alerts make for too many moving parts on screen. you have the option to use pause combat at the start of campaign select but that's the only time. make sure your click it.

the balancing is gated around random loot and money. you can get more money but it's very slow via ATM drip hack. i probably left my PC running overnight for 15 hours just to farm creds. could have just have another gameplay mechanic like putting more aggressive hacks on ATMs but the risk of detection being higher.

tip: you get exp just for moving around enemy bases. you don't even have to kill anything. if you're just in the neutral areas you barely get an XP. you can cheese some early bases finding a clear walkway and just moving back and forth.

overall gameplay is pretty simple and biased toward patient moves. you don't really get to explore freely which is a shame because some of the environments are very pretty to look at. the newly released commandos origins is a better experience but also much harder.

The good news: it's a cool game, the loop is fun. The bad news: By the end of the first zone you've already experienced the full breadth of said gameplay loop, and you still have three-quarters of the game to go.

After a while the monotony starts to grate on you, and the apparently small (and quite droning) OST doesn't help address the feeling of drudgery. This is not the kind of game you can play for 3+ hours at a time, either; you beat it over the course of a few weeks, giving it a few hours at a time because you really can't stand much more than that at once.

Grab it on sale, or probably not at all, unless you're a really big fan of stealth games.