Wolf of The Battlefield: Commando 3
Review by Nintenfan1989

Following the amazing 1985 smash hit Commando and the 1990 master-piece which was Mercs, Wolf of The Battlefield has a lot to live up to.
Its been 18 years since the last game and surprisingly enough the gameplay stays fairly true to its origins, you grab a gun and run through enemy territory killing bad guys and saving POW’s.

Sadly I feel the graphics have taken the series in the wrong direction, gone are the 2D but wonderfully detailed graphics of Mercs, and in are the slightly plain 3D graphics of WoTB.
Don’t get me wrong, the graphics aren’t awful, but they are slightly dull. The environment lacks certain detail and lighting effects are next to non-existent, luckily there is so much going off on the screen that you wont notice lack of detail unless you look for it.

The gameplay is pretty action packed, you run through enemy territory with the left analog stick, and gun everything to death with the right, hundreds of enemies are running at you from all sides and your literally dodging bullets every inch of the way.
With bullets are flying everywhere, its a damned good thing your character is hard as nails, no man i know can take a round of machine gun fire to the head, jump on a dozen land mines and blow himself up with a rocket launcher… and still be running round like nothing has happened, you never loose much health and there is always health packs near by, it makes this game much more easy then the previous 2, this is probably because Capcom no longer feel a need to take our 20p pieces away from us.

What you will notice is the bad collision detection, through out the game your bullets will be stopped by invisible barriers placed near boxes and tank traps, while it can be damned annoying it doesn’t actually distract from the fun, yep, through all its problems the gameplay is still very fun, just like the previous 2, it has its faults but is still very entertaining.
You can switch weapons just by walking over a weapon crate, and since there isn’t any ammo your weapon lasts until you pick up a better one. This includes a lot of guns, Machineguns, Flamethrowers, Rocket Launchers, Shotguns and a wide variety of others, the Rocket Launcher is the most useless weapon i have ever used but except from that they are all really cool.

What isn’t cool though is the vehicle control system, the cars handle like they are floating and unless you have a friend handy to control the gun then it will only fire straight in front of you, this kind of breaks away from the excitement of the 1 man army that Mercs and Commando had, and instead tries to get you to team up with others.
Good thing it has an Online Mode, so even if you don’t have any friends you can still enjoy a full 3-player game.

There isn’t much to say about the story, its a kind of run of the mill action story, meaning there isn’t much of one, but the little cartoony cut-scenes are good and very stylishly done.
On the mention of Cartoony and Very Stylishly Done i have to give extra notice to the Title Menu, it looks brilliant, possibly the best game menu i have ever seen and right at the bottom is a very nice little extra from Capcom… special access to the Beta of the new Street Fighter game.

Over all the game is worth getting if you don’t already have a Run and Gun Shoot em up, it does have a few problems but it is still entertaining, its a game you can quickly jump into for 10 or 20 minutes with out having to study a play guide.
Its all fairly simple stuff and most of the game is the same thing over and over, so your never really forced to learn anything new. The boss battles are slightly boring after a while, but least its something different from the same handful of the far too similar enemies which attack over and over with out rest.
Vehicles spice up what would have been a boring experience and there is also the gun turrets which are brilliant fun to play with, sadly some of them have been placed where it makes the bad collision detection as obvious as possible.

Gameplay: 7/10 - While its pretty much the same thing through-out, it is still very fun.

Graphics: 6/10 - while not bad, they aren’t anything special, apart from the Title Menu which is brilliant.
Story: 2/10 - not much of a story at all.
Sound: 4/10 - once again, its not bad, but its plain.
Controls: 6/10 - would be really good if the vehicle controls was better.
Overall: 6/10 - It has faults, and its pretty plain, but overall it is fun and you do get the Beta version of Street Fighter to try out as well. Give the Trial a try, you may enjoy it.