The Royal Marines Commando from City Interactive (2008) is a "classic" retro WW2 shooter that was definitely a budget title even when released new. There were only six missions total, and your 2 teammates were given unlimited resurrections to keep the plot going. Enemies follow fixed paths and spawn sites, and their only avoidance is they strafe side to side, and your weapons are not very accurate. Playing them in the 2020s (almost 2 decades later), they have very few redeeming qualities other than their subject matter: you play the Brits, not the Yanks.
As the name suggests, you play the Royal Marines Commando, the elite of the British Royal Marines, and Churchill's favorite (Churchill borrowed the term 'Commando' from the Boers). The plot is vaguely fictional but plausible... Brits have captured a Kriegsmarine officer who may be the key to destroying the new Kriegsmarine U-boats that vastly outperform anything else with a new advanced fuel. But the Commando will have to raid various German bases, repel a German raiding team, and eventually, locate the U-boats and destroy them.
However, the game's writers, being Polish, wasn't quite accurate in portraying British and German characters. As a result, the cutscenes feel a bit... Cartoonish, and the heroes sounds way too... John Wayne-ish, even though they are Brits (they do sound British, but the mannerisms are off). And the high echolon? The German Admiral and Winston Churchill? Too... Cartoonish for me.
The game used the Lithtech Jupiter EX Engine, which is comparable to Quake and Unreal Engines of their time, and this version came out in 2005, though usually considered somewhat inferior to the big two. However, it does integrate quite a few features, including DX9 rendering as well as the Havok physics engine. So explosions in the game produce decent object fragmentation, flight, and bounce. Indeed, some classics, such as F.E.A.R., was created by Monolith (parent of LIthtech) with this engine. However, City Interactive did not spent too much time on the game, as they did not optimize the game for widescreen. Indeed, the highest "optimized" resolution for the game was 1440x1080, not the 16:9 1080p resolution of 1920x1080. The game will work in widescreen, but with non-square pixels so looks horizontally stretched.
The characters animation and texture is tolerable for the time, but one can also see the FPS trend to go health pack-less... If you got wounded, simply find cover and rest for a few seconds to auto-heal. Add this to janky movement and aiming (where you can barely see the enemy over the muzzle flashes), combat feels like a matter of memorizing enemy pop-up patterns and stay in cover when possible. There was talk of "stealth", but with very few "silenced" weapons, and enemies scanning around them for threats, even behind them, sneaking up on enemies for silent kills is more luck than ninja. This is a SHOOTER, after all, despite the mission briefings often mention NOT "going loud", and indeed, there were a few enemies that you *should* kill silently, esp. on the only level where you do get to use the De Lisle Commando Carbine (a silenced single-shot carbine)
All in all, this game is for nostalgia only. Save your money for true classics (Brothers in Arms series) , and modern revivals (COD WW2, perhaps).
