The story is rather simple. You guide your men and women (must not be sexist right?) in a squad through a series of WWII scenarios ranging from London to Berlin (in Commandos 3). You guide your squad via the main character, Tiny, through a series of missions to help the allies defeat the Germans. There are a variety of characters to help you in your tasks, including a sniper, a thief and a demolition expert. You are assigned a grouping that is suitable to your needs or what you are expected to need.

This game suffers greatly for requiring the user to be “in the know.” The documentation is basic at best and useless at worst. The training levels are too short and in Commandos 2, utterly useless at teaching you the game. It is almost as if the creators of these games expect the player to have: 1) played the first game in the series, and 2) used a walk-though on the internet. One of the plus sides is that it has taken so much time to come to the Mac that there are plenty of guides online for the game. Expect to use them rather often. To say the learning curve is steep on these two games is an understatement. Feral does have a step-by-step training guide available on their website, but the fact that this sort of documentation is not included in the box is rather upsetting.

If you happen to enjoy dying many times, repeating the same scenario many times due to minor mistakes, then this is the game for you. For most however, I suspect this will get tedious very quickly. This set is truly for fans of the series and not really for anyone else not a devotee of the original game.

As you might have guessed from what I have written so far, the Artificial Intelligence in this game is too often completely useless. An amusing example is that in the training mission of the second game, your side-kick blindly walks into incoming fire. You need to rush ahead of him (making his role useless) and kill all the baddies before he blindly walks into their range.

There are a few good things about this game. It is good for gamers on a budget who do not have a bleeding edge machine. The requirements for both games are reasonable and can be playable on most Macs running OS10.2 or later. There is a lot of game-play for the money here with both games, due the complexity, unforgiving learning curve and multitude of missions/bonus missions. It will take even the most experienced gamer a long time to play this game.

Visually, the game's 2-D 3rd person view can be hard to follow. It takes quite a while to figure out how to turn the game camera so you can see all you need to see. You can also focus in and out, however it does not give anywhere near as large an area when all the way out. The game has quite a few visual glitches (especially Commandos 3) and there are game killing bugs in Commandos 3 from Mission 5 onward. The game loads rather slowly, even on a machine with three times the required RAM. Load times are not impressive on either game; which is a bit odd since the requirements are not that high and I have plenty of RAM.

I have to admit this set of games is the least fun and most frustrating set of games I have played for a very long time. Whether it’s the rubbish game-play, useless documentation and training levels, or bugs, this is not a set that I could recommend to anyone but a hard-core fan. At $40 on Amazon, this game is less than good value for money. There are far better WWII games on the market, and I suspect more to come. There are far better war and strategy games out there for the Mac these days. Skip this patently lackluster collection and find something decent.