The tactics classic returns with a taste of island life

There is a special halo around a videogame level that gives you an entire island to play with. Operation Blindfold, an early mission in Commandos: Origins, drops players onto the Channel Islands in the first half of the Second World War. The main objective is to take down enemy radar installations, but for a few moments, as the camera pans over rock and grass and farmland, none of that matters. Instead, here is a complete island, with a huge military base dominating the higher ground and a handful of beaches and coves to pick over. Everything on display hints at tactical possibilities, but for now this looks like a wonderful playground.

Origins is the latest instalment in the long-running series of realtime tactics games. Once again, players are given a small group of soldiers to lead into battle in taut, stealth-based missions that pit them against the Axis. The odds are overwhelming, but each member of the squad has unique abilities to even things up. Moment to moment, it’s a game of slipping past enemy vision cones, learning patrol routes and the individual rhythms of each map, and then working out how to insert yourself into these streams of information and possibility to achieve your goals.

The new game serves as something of a reboot, or maybe a reminder, of a PC series that first appeared in 1998. It comes from a new developer, Claymore Game Studios, based in Frankfurt and founded to work on the series. It’s a task the team obviously takes quite seriously. As Jürgen Reusswig, Claymore’s studio director, leads us through Operation Blindfold, there’s a winning nervousness to his voice.