Review Reprise: Hidden & Dangerous

I’ve written hundreds of reviews, previews, and retrospectives during my twenty-odd years as a games inspector. As many of these appeared in the British version of PC Gamer magazine and nowhere else, now and again something from my archive may appear as one of THC’s daily posts. Below the jump you’ll find a love letter to Hidden & Dangerous, a SASsy 1999 tactical shooter that’s £1 on Steam at present.

The chatter of machineguns has died away and on-screen prompts are encouraging me to head for the mountains. The mission is over – accomplished – but there’s something I must do before I leave.

Schmeisser in hand I make my way back across the bridge, past the Tiger tank I used to destroy the lock gates, past the dead sentries I slew with deftly flung grenades, past the wreck of the Kubelwagon I exited in the nick of time. I walk until I reach the spot where the bodies of Jim Bird, Will Calvert and Robin ‘Hood’ Smedley lie.

The last time I saw my three SAS comrades they were hunched over hot Brens and Stens. I’d ordered them to hunker-down and hold off the German reinforcements streaming toward the canal from the east. They performed this task admirably. Their defensive determination bought me the breathing space I needed. Their sacrifice enabled the victory. In the circumstances, the least I can do is…

For a second I forget why I’ve gone back. Then it comes to me. Kneeling down, I start rifling their corpses for useful equipment.

When Hidden & Dangerous parachuted onto the PC in 1999, Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, and Brothers In Arms didn’t exist. Before returning to this special forces tactical shooter, it crossed my mind that a large part of my affection for it might be explained by that novelty. Does H&D really have much going for it besides the fact that (apologies for mixed military insertion metaphors) it was one of the very first off the WW2 FPS landing craft?

Within seconds of starting the first of the 23 missions I had my answer. Dumped on a misty, rainy Italian riverbank in the middle of the night, I suddenly remembered how ridiculously atmospheric the game can be. The mournful hoots of distant trains, the incessant patter of raindrops, the rumbles of thunder… this is ambience you can slice with a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife.

I’m a firm fan of the ArmA games, but for all their millions of polygons and lush lighting effects, I’m not sure they deliver a better sense of place than this 12-year-old relic. A nocturnal railyard in H&D feels every bit as real as one in Chernarus. A sleeping town just as ripe with danger. It’s amazing what Illusion Softworks achieved with a dog bark here, and a snatch of gramophone music there.

Not only do most of the levels drip with atmosphere they also teem with tactical options. Very rarely are you frog-marched down a canyon or manacled to a schedule. Want to split your four-man team in half and infiltrate an objective from two sides simultaneously? Do it. Want to go in lone wolf style, dodging patrols and stabbing sentries? Go ahead. The level designers clearly want us to explore and experiment.

For a game with ‘hidden’ in the title, H&D is surprisingly ambivalent towards stealth. Yes, it pays to advance with caution, and keep your flanks well covered, but nervous alley cowering and frantic hide-and-seek seldom figure. It’s rare to encounter a tactical conundrum that can’t be solved with a few hundred rounds of .303. When you quickload in this game, it’s usually because Tommy ‘The Tache’ Harris is squirming in terminal agony on the ground, not because he’s been spotted by some eagle-eyed goon with a hand over an alarm button.

Losing personnel isn’t catastrophic, but thanks to a simple yet clever operation mechanism, every fallen friendly does hurt. Because you only get to bring 8 men on a multi-mission op, taking casualties in early outings means later you can find yourself struggling to destroy a heavy water plant or sabotage a petrol dump with a tiny team.

It’s particularly galling to see your best warriors felled by fire. As every soldier is ability rated in five areas, bad luck or bad planning can occasionally leave you limping towards an operational goal with a bunch of soldiers that are strong as oxen or stealthy as foxes, but pretty mediocre when it comes to marksmanship.

Less of a concern is kill kit. Though all of the action takes place miles behind enemy lines, weapon and ammo resupply is never a problem. A couple of well aimed rifle shots turns most foes into miniature arms dumps. No skirmish is complete without some post-firefight corpse searching. Just about the only weapons that aren’t easy to find in the field are mines, heavy machineguns, and the ever-entertaining timed-explosives.

Bizarrely you’re more likely to discover an unattended Tiger tank or halftrack than an MG42. By today’s standards the modelling of these armoured rides is pretty shoddy, but racing down forest roads, dodging Panzerfausts, and squashing unwary Schützen, the crude models and physics are easy to overlook.

So too are the occasional cock-ups of your comrades. Team-mates might represent the cream of the British Army, but that doesn’t mean they won’t occasionally shoot you in the back of the noggin, or drown while stepping from a jetty to a boat. The best way to prevent such accidents is take direct control at risky moments, bawl simple instructions, or take advantage of the game’s splendid map view.

Dabbing ‘SPACE’ doesn’t just access a 3D map of the level. It opens a planning interface sophisticated enough to allow you to execute an entire mission without ever squeezing a trigger or tossing a nade. Set routes and stances. Tell your troops who to target and when to switch weapons… If Illusion had chosen to they could have wedged the camera in the sky and marketed H&D as a fine Commandos-style RTS.

The fact they stuck with the first- and third-person view, was of course the sensible option. It means we’re that bit closer to all that tension, all those thrills. It means when William’ Spider’ Webb edges along that sodden Italian riverbank, I fancy I can feel the rain dripping down his neck.