Wolf of the Battlefield is the second sequel to Capcom’s popular arcade shooter series: Commando. Much like in the previous games, you take on endless hordes of enemies in a scrolling shooter, giving players a nostalgic experience. A question remains: is WOTB a positive nostalgic experience?

You take control of one of three characters, with whom you go around and shoot stuff. With that out of the way, I could basically finish the review, as this is all that the game is about: shooting stuff for five levels with a number of different weapons and vehicles. Oh yeah, you can rescue captured POWs, but they are pretty useless.

Run-and-gun games can be fun, especially if playing with other people, but Commando 3 makes a fatal mistake. You are permitted to die only so many times per level, and if you die more, you need to start all the way from the beginning of the game. This was probably acceptable in the 80s or 90s on an arcade machine. Today, it simply is not. Casual gamers simply will not have the interest or the patience to play for six hours, only to keep dying on the last level, and having to start from scratch for the sixty-seventh time. Though it can be considered rewarding when you finally beat the game, it’s probably as rewarding as building a sand castle, only to have a huge tidal wave destroy it before you complete it. While you can select levels after you beat the game, it will have probably pissed you off so much that you won’t bother.

Graphics are nothing special. Environments are different every level, but within the levels, there is not too much variation. The same could be said about the music and character design too; simply nothing special or varied.

If it weren’t for the tiny, yet game-breaking detail, WOTB could have been one of the better arcade shooters out there. Now, however, I can only recommend it to hardcore and desperate arcade-shooter fans.