Commandos: Origins is the spiritual successor of the Commandos series by Pyro Studios. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.

Commandos: Origins Review Overview

What is Commandos: Origins?

Commandos: Origins is a real-time tactics game set during World War II, serving as a prequel to the classic Commandos series. Players control a team of six specialized soldiers, each with unique skills suited for stealth, sabotage, and rescue missions. The game features a variety of historical locations, from the Arctic to North Africa and Europe.

Commandos: Origins features:
　⚫︎　2-Player co-op mode
　⚫︎　More than 10 WW2-inspired missions
　⚫︎　Real-time tactics gameplay
　⚫︎　6 Commandos with various specialties
　⚫︎　Multiple ways to clear missions
　⚫︎　Various collectibles hidden per area

Platform
Steam		PlayStation Store		Microsoft Store
$49.99		$59.99

Commandos: Origins Pros & Cons

Pros	Cons
You’re Only Limited By Your Imagination Low Skill Floor, High Skill Ceiling	Remember to Save, Save, Save! How Is This Game So Graphically Demanding? Controls Have Noticeable Lag

Commandos: Origins Overall Score - 68/100

Commandos: Origins offers competent real-time tactics gameplay that will satisfy fans of the genre, provided they aren’t expecting anything groundbreaking. Its story is largely forgettable, and both visuals and voice acting feel dated, though functional. At $49.99, the price feels a bit ambitious for what is ultimately a very practical—but unremarkable—package.

Commandos: Origins Story – 6/10

A token story if I’ve ever seen one. Nothing in Commandos: Origins’ narrative stands out, leaves an impression, or even raises an eyebrow. It’s just the standard wartime tale of a few elite soldiers disproportionately influencing entire battles through their dangerous missions behind enemy lines.

Commandos: Origins Gameplay – 8/10

Anyone who enjoys real-time tactics will surely appreciate what Commandos: Origins brings to the table. It’s gritty, demands your attention, and can easily force a reset if you mess up even once. Sure, the mission structure is linear, and the controls might make you question whether your mouse, keyboard, or gamepad is still functioning properly (it likely is), but even in its current form, it’s more than enough to tickle the fancy of anyone without sky-high expectations.

Commandos: Origins Visuals – 7/10

Despite having a UI that looks like it time-traveled from twenty years ago, a severe lack of actual animated cutscenes, and the occasional visual bug, Commandos: Origins still looks pretty decent. The icons are intuitive, the range indicators are reliable, and even the alert display practically dares you to look away. Unfortunately, “practical” is the only word that really fits here—the overall presentation would struggle to earn the label of “pretty.”

Commandos: Origins Audio – 7/10

I kind of expected the voice acting to be awkward as all heck, and boy, I wasn’t disappointed. It honestly sounds like they gathered a bunch of rough-sounding men in their 30s and 40s, deprived them of water for two days, and then handed them a script. On the other hand, the music and sound effects do a solid job of pulling you in and keeping the experience engaging overall.

Commandos: Origins Value for Money – 6/10

If this game didn’t cost $49.99, it’d have scored higher here. Commandos: Origins definitely offers high replayability thanks to all the collectibles and varied ways to complete objectives. But when you’re priced in the same bracket as a full-blown AA title without the polish to back it up, that price tag just feels like too much.

And definitely don’t buy it on console. It’s 10 whole bucks more expensive there.

Commandos: Origins Review: Old, Functional, and Surprisingly Fun

Despite being a big fan of RTS games, I only occasionally dabble in its grittier cousin, RTT (real-time tactics). As for why—well, I guess it’s because I enjoy the feeling of commanding grand armies rather than a select handful of powerful units. Nonetheless, I’m quite familiar with the Commandos series, especially Men of Courage, which I played rather repeatedly back when I was still, erm, young.

Now, that was all the way back in the early 2000s. Today is just another day in 2025, and there’s over twenty years between Men of Courage and today’s subject, Origins. Heck, this isn’t even made by Pyro Studios, the original developers behind the first several Commandos titles. Hence, I won’t be judging this game as part of the Commandos series, but rather on its own.

What is Commandos: Origins, anyway? To sum it up, it’s a real-time tactics game with a top-down, isometric view that has you control multiple characters with various specializations—ranging from the Green Beret for good old-fashioned muscle, the Sapper for traps, and the Sniper for long-ranged and silent engagements.

Your average mission consists of getting the gang from point A to point B, doing something there, and then going back to point A or somewhere else. There may be some detours along the way, but the general routine doesn’t really change. However, that’s not to say it’s boring. That’s because the level designs in Commandos: Origins require you to rub your last pair of brain cells together to get to your destination in one piece.

Why? Because in this game, there’s barely any room for error. If one of your commandos kicks the bucket, it’s game over and a forced restart.

Satisfying Difficulty

The Commandos series is known for its emphasis on stealth, with missions that barely allow for a bad takedown or a clumsy grenade throw. The same could be said for its spiritual successor, Commandos: Origins. You see, success here is determined by whether you can avoid enough of your enemies’ attention that they don’t call the entire base down on your butt.

To do so, you have access to all the typical bells and whistles any normal human being can do, such as crawling, opening doors, hiding under bushes, and—yes—shooting people with a gun. However, each commando under your control also has specialized abilities that match their profession. For example, the Sapper specializes in setting traps and paving a path through terrain, the Sniper is great at taking down enemies from afar in silence, and the Green Beret is an expert in… beating people up.

But even with their fancy tools and sharp wits, they are just a handful of individuals at the end of the day. Against an entire base’s worth of enemies, by comparison, they’re nothing. So you need to use everything at your disposal to accomplish your mission—suffering the occasional failure and then realizing you forgot to save the game at a convenient point before shouting into the vast, empty remnants of your motivation.

What Isn’t Satisfying, Is Its Responsiveness

Now, a difficult game could’ve been a perfect way to pass your time after work by stressing yourself out even more. But if you ask me, having controls that sometimes pretend you don’t exist isn’t a great way to impress your audience.

This is especially true whenever you sneak up behind enemies and take them down; the next thing you’re supposed to do—at least usually—is pick up their bodies and throw them somewhere nobody can see. But sometimes, it just doesn’t work and might even require some awkward repositioning to function.

Not good if you’re trying to murder someone in-between patrols.

Meanwhile, there are parts of the game that are way too responsive, such as loading a save file. That is, because the game doesn’t confirm your intent to load, it instantly does so the moment you click on one. And thanks to the Save button being so close to your save files, that’s going to result in an uncomfortably high number of facepalms and groaning into your arms.

Lots of Freedom Within Its Design

I can’t exactly describe Commandos: Origins as a sandbox experience. But there is a lot of freedom afforded to the player in tackling its stealth puzzles. For example, if you wanted to kill everything in your path, you can definitely do so by using various hiding places and enemy patrol patterns to lure them into ambushes. There’s also the slightly noisier alternative—explosives—to eliminate enemies and sneak past the distracted guards.

And if you really want to make life as troublesome as possible, you can attempt runs where you cause as few casualties as possible. That, in turn, makes getting around the map much harder, since you’ll always be under someone’s field of vision—or makes enemy reinforcements stronger due to the number of enemies you’ll have to fight off. The world is your oyster.

The one thing you can’t do, however, is go in guns blazing. Your commandos will die quickly, I assure you. How could you, anyway? The pistol is practically useless, barely able to fire more than a few meters ahead. Do its bullets evaporate right after reaching max range?

I Do Wonder How This Got Past QA, Though

After playing this game on release and witnessing the laundry list of fixes the developers have released, I can confidently say that nobody bothered to do QA work properly. Heck, the optimization is somehow bad enough that it causes hilarious scenes—like the one above—to have an unsurprising rate of occurrence.

Some of these issues are game-breaking, mind you. For example, enemy lights turning on again after you’ve loaded past a point where you’d deactivated them can actually screw you over. This also applies to AI behavior, which can reset after a load, undoing whatever state you had them in.

The most annoying thing, though, are the help messages that pop up every time you encounter something new. They stay on for what I can only describe as a completely random period—sometimes never disappearing at all, more often vanishing before you can read past the headers.

Is Commandos: Origins Worth It?

Wait for a Sale

Don’t get me wrong—the game is fun. Even after a dozen-odd hours of playing nearly non-stop, I’d still find myself constantly locked in whenever my usual (admittedly cheap) tactics of excessively relying on enemies to run into ambush spots failed. There’s a lot to consume, and Commandos: Origins offers it up right out of the box.

But whenever I remember that this costs a cent short of $49.99 (even worse on consoles), I can’t help but reel slightly. In its current state, this title is definitely not worth that amount. It lacks the kind of polish you should absolutely expect from releases at this price point. So, if you can help it, wait for a discount. Steam has a lot of those, at least.

Platform
Steam		PlayStation Store		Microsoft Store
$49.99		$59.99

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Commandos: Origins Product Information

Title	COMMANDOS: ORIGINS
Release Date	April 9, 2025
Developer	Claymore Game Studios
Publisher	Kalypso Media
Supported Platforms	PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S
Genre	Action, Tactics
Number of Players	1
ESRB Rating	PEGI 16
Official Website	Commandos: Origins Website

Alfonso Majarucon

Writer of things from game, anime and manga reviews to news and webnovels. Hopelessly addicted to story-driven games, especially cross-platform ones. Favorite games include Punishing Gray Raven, Arknights, Limbus Company, Elden Ring, Touhou, Soul Nomad and the Disgaea series (except 3 and 6). Avid..