Commandos 2 & Praetorians: HD Remaster Double Pack PS4 Review –
Traditionally PC-orientated games have been finding it easier and easier to translate the experience to consoles thanks to breakthroughs in control-mapping. It has meant the likes of Divinity: Original Sin, XCOM 2, and Wasteland 3 have felt comfortable to handle away from their regular home, and it’s also led to classic cRPGs getting a new lease of life with a modern audience.
Praetorians comes to PS4 alongside another early 2000s RTS classic in Commandos 2, and while both suffer from the passage of time. Praetroians ends up in a better situation than the terrible remaster of Commandos 2.
Commandos 2 & Praetorians: HD Remaster Double Pack PS4 Review
Commandos 2 Is A Devastatingly Poor Port Of A Tactical Great
It’s somewhat disappointing that the HD Remaster of classic WWII strategy title Commandos 2 opens with a staggering wall of text explaining what the buttons do on your controller. No gradual introduction, minimal prompts, and punishing game difficulty may be reasons why Commandos 2 was an excellent game on PC, but it wouldn’t hurt to ease people in a little more gently when you’re nearly 20 years removed from the context.
If that was the only obstacle to overcome, it’d be forgivable. Unfortunately, it’s merely the opening act of this tragedy.
Commandos 2 is a real-time strategy game that subscribes heavily to the idea that trial and error is a key selling point. You have control over a squad of commandos, each with their own skills that are vital if you’re to defeat the Nazis in a series of covert missions. Its focus is on stealth over firepower, so picking the right gruff man for the job and ensuring you don’t leave the other gruff men in a vulnerable position is a common dilemma, one you can’t really shoot your way out of. There’s depth and intelligence to Commandos 2, but not a lot in the way of tactical flexibility when things head to brown town.
Again, this could be fairly chalked up to a quirk of the game’s age, but that inflexibility, alongside the real-time aspect, lack of checkpointing, and the fiddly, overwhelming, and frankly buggy, controls snowball until it becomes oh-so-easy to find fault with practically everything about this remaster. It’s almost as if someone involved with this thought that releasing a complex, disjointed, poorly-aged RTS with hardcore appeal would be enough because hey, those kids like them some Dark Souls, right? And that’s tough? Not for the first time in the past decade since the Souls games gained prominence, someone confuses challenge with needless frustration.
The transition between characters is slow, unpredictable, and sometimes unresponsive, causing unfair failure on multiple occasions. The same goes for selecting tools and actions. The responsiveness of a mouse and keyboard is very much needed to keep up with the speed of the sneaky juggling act of skill-based soldiers, especially as these military trained hard bastards have a complete inability to do certain simple tasks because it’s deemed a ‘skill’ for another member of their team.
Where there should be tension and excitement as you line up your squad to pull off some covert sabotage instead becomes a game of chance where you might fail because you forgot one guy can’t gag a Nazi like the rest or throw down a ladder. That’s not a character trait, that’s a fairly shite elite soldier and human being.
In itself, that’s another quirk of age. After all, this comes from the early days of stealth in games, and as such, there’s a fuzzy understanding of what should and shouldn’t work in tandem with mechanics. Still, it doesn’t make it any less of a baffling pain in the backside, and thrown together with the technical faults that could have been tweaked or fixed even slightly to ease the burden of a creaking RTS framework, it destroys any tangible enjoyment you could get out of Commandos 2.
There are mild positives to this remaster. It undoubtedly looks better than the original, with cleaner-looking visuals and UI (even if they aren’t backed up by the underlying muddled mechanics), and if (a BIG if) you can wade through the burst sewer pipe’s worth of problems and get to grips with the mechanics of the game, then it has fleeting moments of thrilling tension that aren’t just down to wondering if the unwieldy controls are going to fail you again.
That’s honestly about it. I had quite fond memories of Commandos 2, but it’s abundantly clear that this remaster is not only a poor console port, but a generally underwhelming attempt to ‘modernise’ a classic. Make no bones about it, Commandos 2 is exactly the kind of classic game that needs proper modernisation to appeal to a new audience. This remaster not only fails to modernise the game, it somehow makes it even less accessible and enjoyable for newcomers and old hands alike.
Translating RTS To A Console
The concept of Praetorians will be familiar to anyone who has picked up a real-time strategy game like Total War. There are historical battles based on Julius Caesar’s attack on Gaul, his Civil War, and Crassus’ campaign in Parthia. The player gets to control one of three groups (the Roman Republic, the Ptolemaic Kingdom, or Barbarians). You control units rather than individuals and march them into a variety of war scenarios that focus on winning in terms of combat and territory.
You can split your units into smaller groups, adopt tactical positions, and lay siege to your enemies. All standard tactical fare these days, and although this means Praetorians is overshadowed by the many iterations on that formula in the last 17 years since its original release, it’s slightly less dated on a console, where RTS games are a relative rarity, let alone a unit-based RTS. So it comes into a more favourable territory in that regard.
The downside is that as this genre of game is so scarce on consoles, it’s a lot harder to translate successfully. The initial tutorial thankfully takes it slow and introduces you to how unit management works in detail, how to direct troops to face in the right direction (they will literally face the same direction at all times otherwise) so they don’t get caught out in battle, and how to create basic tactical placing ahead of a big fight. It’s a bit laborious to make even the simplest of manoeuvres and there’s a lack of urgency to skirmishes when they do finally happen, but it works fairly well considering the jump to a controller. It helps that units and manoeuvres are labelled in a straightforward way, easing potential confusion.
It does get a tad more fiddly when things get more chaotic, but Praetorians’ idea of chaotic looks like a scuffle at a nightclub compared to the modern variants of epic virtual warmongering, so it’s just about manageable. That does, however, bring up a whole different issue. Namely how dull and repetitive Praetorians gets.
Repetition, Repetition, Repetition
While it may be relatively unchallenged in terms of comparison on console, there’s no escaping the fact that Praetorians’ brand of unit-based RTS action is somewhat muted. Even with a touch up on the visuals and animation, there’s still no real spark to the battles that suggest vicious stabbings, slicing, and impaling of warriors in a hard-fought fight to the death. This is more like smudgy rows of colour bumping into each other until one is down. Imagination fills in gaps, naturally, but it hardly sells the idea of this being a savage war. This isn’t a full-on remake so it’s not fair to expect too much in the way of modern flourishes, but it really could do with some extra visual flourish to help out the dated combat animations. In fact, a remake would have been the better way to approach this.
Thanks to its age, there’s little dynamism to encounters. It’s all rather straightforward sub-MOBA clicking to little effect, and the only time you really see freedom is when a unit inexplicably goes wandering away from the main group. Scenarios have little variance beyond go there, hit that too, so there’s not a lot that’s compelling in terms of narrative either outside historical context.
Also not helping is the AI, which provides no stiff challenge, even in bigger battles. Often it’s the strategy equivalent of bad guys lining up one by one to fight the martial arts hero. It inadvertently offsets some of the other issues, but when the greatest threat to victory is a game’s problems, it doesn’t speak well for the game’s challenge.
Topping off this gripe juice is a splash of technical trouble tequila. Despite not exactly troubling the power of modern consoles, Praetorians stutters and struggles on occasion, and full-on crashes at other times. Sometimes a heady concoction of both occurs just to make sure you don’t forget the trudging bore of a mission you just had to endure. It’s not game-breaking by any means, but it certainly adds to the overall unpleasantness Praetorians gives off.
Serviceable, But Not Technically Competent
There are mild positives to this remaster. Commandos undoubtedly looks better than the original, with cleaner-looking visuals and UI (even if they aren’t backed up by the underlying muddled mechanics), and if (a BIG if) you can wade through the burst sewer pipe’s worth of problems and get to grips with the mechanics of the game, then it has fleeting moments of thrilling tension that aren’t just down to wondering if the unwieldy controls are going to fail you again.
That’s honestly about it. I had quite fond memories of Commandos 2, but it’s abundantly clear that this remaster is not only a poor console port, but a generally underwhelming attempt to ‘modernise’ a classic. Make no bones about it, Commandos 2 is exactly the kind of classic game that needs proper modernisation to appeal to a new audience. This remaster not only fails to modernise the game, it somehow makes it even less accessible and enjoyable for newcomers and old hands alike.
As for Praetorians, it is a very okay game, in itself, there’s little to truly hate about it, but it’s also so dry, dull, and technically-challenged that it transcends its okayness and becomes simply bad. It may not be the sort of game we get much of on PlayStation, but that doesn’t mean it deserves a pass.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-25l8EMR8n4
Commandos 2 & Praetorians: HD Remaster Double Pack is availe now on PS4.
Review copy provided by publisher.