Commando review: one soldier, one direction, no way back

A helicopter lands in the jungle, drops off one soldier, and flies away. That is the entire story. The rest is a screen that scrolls north, enemies that pour in from every side, and a young man named Super Joe who is not coming home unless you walk him there.

The gun and the grenade point different ways

Joe's rifle has unlimited ammunition and fires in any of eight directions, whichever way he faces. His grenades are the opposite. He has a limited supply of grenades, and they fly only toward the top of the screen, no matter where he is looking. That mismatch is the cleverest thing in the game.

The rifle is for the soldier running at you from the side. The grenade is for the machine gun nest up ahead behind a wall, where bullets cannot reach. So you are always doing two jobs: dodging and firing around you, while lining yourself up underneath the next thing that needs a grenade. Get that rhythm and the game feels like a dance. Lose it and the jungle eats you.

Bullets for what is around you. Grenades for what is ahead. Everything else is footwork.

The officer who runs

At the end of each stretch the screen stops at a gate, and a cowardly officer orders his men out and immediately runs away. If you can shoot him in the back before he escapes, you get bonus points. It is a small, mean joke, and it gave every player a goal beyond survival. You would risk a life just to catch him, and the kid watching over your shoulder would cheer when you did.

A lesson Capcom learned twice

Tokuro Fujiwara was leading Commando and Ghosts 'n Goblins at the same time, and you can feel the same hand in both: simple controls, a harsh difficulty, and the sense that the game respects you enough to kill you quickly. And despite the timing, the game is unrelated to the film of the same name.

What it meant back then

In American arcades Commando looked like the action movies on the video store wall. It was a stand-up cabinet you found at the 7-Eleven, in the corner of the roller rink, beside the pinball tables at the pizza place, with Data East distributing it in North America. Everybody knew how it worked in ten seconds, and almost nobody got very far, which is exactly the formula that keeps quarters moving.

Playing it now

It is short, fast, and completely honest. There are no upgrades to lean on and no second player to save you. The first run lasts a minute. The tenth run lasts much longer, because you stopped firing grenades at the wrong things. Every war game that followed borrowed something from this one, and the original is still the cleanest version.