WarCommander

Warcommander is a fun game which follows the events of World War II in a realistic setting with actual scenarios and scenery. In its core, you control a fixed army of soldiers that have been granted to you at the beginning of the level and you need to fulfill your mission, following the rules of the scenario.

Some maps require you to blow up a certain bunker on a certain part of the map, other scenarios force you to wait until a specific time that a car with a high-ranking officer is passing by and destroy it. Some scenarios have clear failing conditions. As a kid, I lost many games, and I simply did not know why. What rule did I break, how much time was left, all questions that became clear when I played Warcommander at a later age.

You got two campaigns that eventually end the same but follow different missions, starting from the Utah and Omaha beaches. The entire game sets in Europe and you fight in France, the Netherlands and in the end, Germany itself. You only fight as the United States, and your only enemies are the Germans. Although fine, this game could really use some Russians or Japanese, just for the variation. Games like Panzers and Blitzkrieg did this eventually but came out later.

The graphics are in a 2D top-down perspective and look fair for the time. There is blood and enemies stay on the ground when killed. The explosion animations are bullet impacts are nicely done.

There is no music in Warcommander and the sound is all-right and mostly generic. The only exception is when you call in an airstrike. The roaring of the planes is deafening, and it really feels like the apocalypse is coming for you when those things arrive.

The game reminded me a little bit of Commando’s but instead of an elite team of four, you control an army. Your army is deployed at a certain starting point and await your command. You got your standard soldier, machine gunners, pioneers, medics, snipers and many more. Like I said before, you start with a fixed army. If a soldier dies, it is lost forever in that mission. It is really hard to control so many soldiers at once and the last thing you want to happen, is all of them clustering on a single spot and then get killed by a grenade or rocket, wiping out half your army in a single attack (speaking from experience).

Although still a good game, Warcommander has its flaws when it comes to the game play. The biggest one is the following exploit: Your pioneers can build stuff like bunkers, hospitals and ammo depots. In many missions (not all), you have a pioneer and a sniper in your army. The result is that you can build an ammo depot, your sniper camouflages himself, goes solo through the whole map, kills every living soul in sight, restocks on ammo between the killing. Rince and repeat. Many maps I cleared with a single sniper because I had access to an ammo depot. You could call this strategy; I call it exploiting.

Also, the enemy AI is incredibly dumb. When they see your ass, they stand, wiggle a little back and forth, lock their attention on you, start moving towards you and then try attacking. The time that it takes for them to react and take action, gives you enough time to kill them, their ghost and their shadow afterwards. This makes the game somewhat easy in a way, even on higher difficulties.

In the end, despite its flaws, I still think Warcommander is a fun game that had a lot of potential for a better sequel. As far as I know, this never happened, which is a shame.

Still recommend this old gem as a classic.