I only played Beyond the Call of Duty as a child so this was new to me. This game is quite difficult and I think without cheats it would have taken me weeks to beat.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=316775092

If you're interested as I was, a timeline of similar games:
1998 Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines
1999 Commandos: Beyond the Call of Duty
2001 Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive
2001 Commandos 2: Men of Courage
2002 Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood
2003 Commandos 3: Destination Berlin
2006 Desperados 2: Cooper's Revenge
2007 Helldorado
2016 Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun
2020 Desperados III

"Suuure thang" "Okeydokey" "finally... Some action" "I'll be roit there" "consider it done boss"

"Shall i give 'em a hand... Or i knoif?" "comin' over" "oim comin'" "comin" "That's easy" "Just leave it to me"

"Ein verletzter! Alarm! Alarm!" "HALT!"

"Yep?" "YYYep?" "Yes?" "MmmYes?" "Right" "Nope" "Nnnope" "Okay" "Coming" "Mmhmm"

"Impossible Sir" "Can't do that sir" "No way sir" "Yes... Sir" "Coming sir" "Coming roit over... Sir" "Understood sir" "Immediately sir" "Right-oh sir"

Background:
Purchased as part of a bundle from Bundle Stars. I played the first two games in the series to death back when they came out.

Impressions:
Commandos stands tall among action strategy games. It was a simple formula: a set of men are dropped into a mission, each with a certain set of skills and using them in concert you dismantle the enemies defences and confound their long term goals.

While the games does lean heavily on the two most useful characters (Tiny and the Spy) the situations force you to think creatively and apart from a few small instances you are completely free to tackle the mission as you see fit.

It's almost bewildering that no game has successfully recaptured the formula since, even the successive games in the franchises have failed to really improve or even live up to this classic piece of strategy.

Each mission can take minutes or even several hours to complete on your first run through and while the Merit system on completion gives you a score (based on damage taken, damage done and speed of completion) you can be drawn back to try and complete the mission quicker and more cleverly there is ultimately no reward for doing so.. other than your own satisfaction.

The biggest issue is that the Steam version of the game installs poorly and in an almost unusable state. the game runs impossibly fast on modern PCs, the config file is missing the line to allow saving, multicore PCs will make the game unstable and widescreen monitors have black bands at the boarders. thankfully all these can be fixed and I've collated all the fixes I used on the Commandos wikia as noted below.

Fixes:

See the page on the 'Commandos Wikia' for 'Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines Fixes'.

http://commandos.wikia.com/wiki/Fixing_Commandos

The Good:
*A classic formula that stands up today for it's simplicity and functions.
*Missions can be tackled many ways.
*The settings have a historical context and introduced as such.
*Missions are diverse.
*Fast save/load system makes experimentation less frustrating than you'd think.
*Huge sense of triumph from executing a plan that takes out even a single awkward guard.
*Looks pretty good considering it's age.

The Bad:
*Terrible install from Steam that makes the game unplayable without some searching and tweaking.
*Merit is heavily determined by speed which I don't find fun.
*The leveling mechanic 'Merit' never had a function originally nor now.
*Vehicles are overpowered but also limited.
*A few missions have an element that only has one solution...
*Leading to some missions having to be restarted unless you keep lots of saves.

Recommended for: War, Action and isometric strategy fans.

Conclusion.
9/10. Once the screen, stability and speed issues are fixed it's a huge blast.

Old? No, it is classic.

"Coming right over...sir."
"Coming."
"Coming over."
"I'M COMING!"

Coming simulator 10/10 do recommend

Flowchart tl;dr recommendation:

-Extremely fun and interesting puzzlegame which has aged surprisingly well.
-Reasonable replay value.

(Begin walloftext)

Commandos : Behind Enemy Lines is the first game in the Commandos series, made by Spanish company called Pyro Studios and released originally in 1998. What looks like run-of-the-mill RTS game set in the WW2 surrounded by the world's most inept guards and impossible to play as one expects an RTS to play in the first place, it is more like a puzzle game. The puzzle is to complete your given objectives ("blow ♥♥♥♥ up" or "blow more ♥♥♥♥ up" with occasional assassination or prisoner rescue thrown in) with none of your commandos actually dying while utilsing their very specialised and limited set of tools. I am willing to go as far as argue it does partially embody the spirit of an old, campy war and\or spy film minus less shooting... at times.

The slapstick comedy crew consists of the green beret, jack of all trades and the general all-arounder for sneaky-stabbing, the sniper who is only good at sniping and sometimes attracting guards, the diver who is good when it involves sneaking or eliminating without need to move bodies or anything involving water, the sapper who likes to blow ♥♥♥♥ up and enjoys the perk of a bear trap, the driver who can drive anything, operate HMG nests and occasionally carries a submachinegun in some missions and the spy who is like the green beret only can steal a disguise from the laundry to move around at will and distract guards or patrols. While the enemy guards in the game are inept, your commandos also skipped basic training. Only the beret, diver, spy and sapper can eliminate in any silent manner and the beret and spy can move bodies, and the driver and sniper sometimes behave as very interesting prestige class that serves only couple of purposes in most missions. While annoying at first glance, I find it add some charm to the game given every mission is functionally a puzzle anyway, and you can be somewhat creative with their use to a limited degree. Your only silent killers are being held at gunpoint but your sapper is nearby and has the beartrap? Well as it turns out you can use it as an improvised "knife" in such situation.

The gameplay is quite simple in its comedic logic. Every guard has a line of sight with two portions, up close they can detect anyone but from afar they cannot see anyone crawling, they can range from stationary guards to looking in certain areas periodically to patrolling certain areas to larger patrols with submachineguns. If they find a body they will investigate and usually raise the alarm soon enough. If they find any of your commandos they will usually aim at him and do nothing unless you do anything, but of course if your commando stands next to a dead body needless to say they are not fond of it. Good portion of the gameplay revolves how to eliminate guards in various manners they cannot see you doing anything suspicious directly in their line of sight or in some cases, how to bypass said issues. This can range from simply finding a place to sneak through and eliminating certain guard in order to allow other guards to be eliminated, using the sniper to drop a specific guard that prevents any kind of sneaking while ensuring nobody sees the guard fall off and die while you do it and so on. And of course unnecessary gunfire tends to not work out so well unless you find a good spot to lure guards and murder everyone in sight. Or Plan B was put into effect.

Where the game shines is the variety of ludicrous situations which tend to show up in the game. To sneak past guard A to stab guard B behind the tent, C has to be sneezing while D has to be scratching his nose while E has to turn around while F is also watching the opposite direction while ensuring E cannot see your footsteps in the snow. A solid plan, but as an alternative one of your commandos deliberately shows up in C's line of sight which in turn orders your commando to HALT! and keep watch which in turn attracts every other guard to come see what the commotion is and entire firing squad of HALT! is directed at one of the commandos. As long as the said commando does nothing, now another one is free to drop them all at once as the aiming guards can no longer see eachother and are far away from eachother you can eliminate them one by one. A solid plan once again, but what if we instead use horribly mistuned 1920s Philips radio to attract some of the soldiers to investigate and then clean up the rest? Or what about leaving footprints in the snow and let the beret hide under the snow instead? Or how about leaving footprints in a manner it leads away, then hide the beret under the snow so the guard sees another commando due following the footprints and is now up for ambush from behind? Oh the possibilities.

Mission design varies a lot in a good way and the difficulty curve is pretty good, if occasionally all over the place. The objectives rarely change and there is not a whole lot of spice to them, but the fun part is the journey how to achieve those. Especially in later missions it is possible to have something accidental happen which works in the player's favour, such as guard seeing the body but not seeing you directly -> investigate -> improvise and move the body just enough when he takes the long way around and ambush the guard who is investigating. There is some trial and error involved until one begins to pay attention to certain key factors, but guard behaviour is not entirely universal. In later missions almost exclusively any commando found will be shot on sight (at least we can say the devs did some research there) and there are missions where alarm is simply not an option before destruction of the objective, so there is at least some variety in approach and sometimes the good old simple tactic does not work in a particular mission, or in particular part of said mission.

It is one of those games in desperate need of a proper remake and\or sequel.

(P.S. I recommend memorising the basic hotkeys. It will make the game a lot easier to get hang of given it is pretty heavy on timing at times, and sometimes one to two second of unnecessary delay means the difference between succesful manoeuvre, elimination of a guard or so or an alarm in a mission where any premature alarm is not simply an option.)

I had a pirate version when I was a kid. And in this cracked version the SAVE didn't work.

So before you say this game was difficult, remember me....I reached level 14 WITHOUT SAVINGS!!!! You can imagine the amount of time I spent in this masterpiece....

One the bests games of my childhood.

When I first played this game, back in 2000, I was in awe. I had just won my first computer, an AMD K6-II with 32MB of RAM... it's hard to describe how immersive this game was back then... 'member? I 'member.

This is my childhood game. 15 years ago it was too hard for me :)
Now it's too easy. and my computer load hundred times faster for this game..
back then I had to put CD and loading would take around a minute, quick load still not quick
This is the only commandos that I haven't beat :)

I watched some advanced player playing it, and they played like 3-5 minutes per level and back then I took me hours just to beat a level :(

you should get this game when it is bundled, I got mine from GMG daily deal.. it was bundled several times. This is one of my favorite when EIdos still exist, now they long gone, some title like Tomb Raider is still continue, but they abandon Commandos. Poor little guy, especially "Tiny" who isn't tiny at all

btw, if you are using win 7 or higher, you should find patch because the dev (technically not Eidos, but Square Enix , the now own them) don't really care with very old game like this, you have to manually replace the exe and some dll, and poof the game speed is normal

One of the best childhood games.
Memories never dies, and classic games never gets old!
Incredible! 10/10