Developer: Backbone Entertainment
Publisher: Capcom

Xbox Live is home to a glut of remakes, mostly just repolishings, of games from the arcade’s “Golden Era” (read as: the ’80s). Titles like Double Dragon and Contra have shown up with little more than a few coats of new lacquer and some achievement points shoehorned in for good measure. And for the most part, gamers have been able to see through the smoke and mirrors marketing that goes along with these and have outspokenly decried the lack of effort that goes into them. Lucky for us then that Capcom has responded to this outcry with full on remakes (rather than just a little extra color) of classics like Bionic Commando (see Bionic Commando: Rearmed), Street Fighter 2 (Turbo HD Remix) and now, Commando…sorta.

Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3 isn’t a remake of an older Commando per se, though it feels a lot like a combination of the two previous titles of the same namesake. It’s a totally new game, borrowing heavily in the gameplay department from the second iteration in the series, Mercs, and upping the ante with bright and (literally) explosive visuals.

Sitting down with the game, you’re first tasked with choosing your character and given a lite stat background for each — one is slow and strong, one is fast and weak and the other is somewhere in between. The masochistic gamer in you may want to choose the fast and weak character to test your abilities, and we’d like to strongly suggest against that. While WotB is a less than impossible game, it’s difficulty level is scaled based on the amount of energy you start each new life with rather than making the AI actually play more strategically, a problematic way of setting things up for players interested in a challenge deeper than “I can take less bullets now.”

And you will take a lot of bullets, marked occasionally with the trademark grunt or howl (depending on your sprite’s gender). Other than this noise and that of your constant stream of bullets (fed via analog sticks, a la Geometry Wars), you’ll likely find yourself decidedly bored with the forgettable soundtrack.

Though we tired of the music fairly quickly, the action brought us back to the NES days (sorry old folks, we’re not quite old enough to have sunk hours in at arcades.) Unfortunately, WotB’s biggest failing is this feature: it evokes NES nostalgia without reinvigorating the formula. Yes, you can pick up a couple of different weapon types and, more importantly, level them up a bit (though not as much as we’d have liked). Yes, there’s a bit of a vehicle based combat situation in a couple of levels (though the thing drives like a couch). Problem is, none of these conventions are groundbreaking or amazing — not only have we seen them before (in 16-bit era games) but we’ve seen them done better before. Would it have been so much to add a roll feature? Maybe a few other weapon types, or even the ability to hold more than one weapon at a time?

Niggling complaints aside, WotB is a lot of fun to play. It brought back my fighting spirit, once destroyed by Ikari Warriors in a single nine hour play session. In it’s truest definition, the game’s primarily a bullet hell game, albeit less “Helly” than others. And in authentic arcade fashion, there’s no continue in WotB — you get your set amount of lives from the get-go and that’s that, one shot. That being said, you can most likely blast through Commando 3 in under two hours, less with a friend (and you can play in person or online co-op with up to two of those).

For 800 spacebucks ($10), is Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3 worth the price? We’re going to have to give that a trepidatious “no.” While the gameplay is enjoyable and surprisingly replayable, there just aren’t enough updates to this formula to warrant the price tag.

(P.S. We didn’t find it worth mentioning that yes, the Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix beta did come with this game. If you haven’t played it yet, well, it’s Street Fighter II Turbo, except it’s redrawn.)

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