Sometimes they would all bunch up at the bottom and I could wander over and pick them off. Speaking of climbing, the enemy AI had a few problems negotiating ladders. Leaning, crouching, climbing, lying prone, switching to different soldiers, entering tactical mode (more on that in a moment) pausing the game…I don't know why there's a button for climbing, but there you go. In other action games, this is usually reserved for weapon switching, and there isn't an easy-to-reach substitute with all the other commands you'll need. By default, you control your soldier's movement speed with the mouse scroll. You can do most operations pretty easily with the mouse, but things are still a bit clunky. HD2 has a command for virtually every button on the keyboard, and even resorts to ALT and SHIFT variants. And I don't suspect it was because they wanted to avoid complicating things. With so much emphasis on combat, I would have expected to see an extensive skill breakdown in this department. There was no skill division between heavy and light guns, with pistols being lumped in with bazookas. When I chose a loadout before a mission, I always discarded any sidearms and gave them a rifle and a machine gun, because of how flexible HD2 allowed the Shooting stat to be. For me to be equally proficient with a sniper rifle as with a submachine gun almost feels like cheating, especially given this game's attention to technical detail. With class-based combat, you have the medic, the grunt, the sniper, the spy, etc. It would have made more sense to fold this into the Stealth skill and divide the Shooting skill instead. But Lock Picking simply isn't used enough (hardly at all, actually) to justify giving it a stat of its own. Your stats are divided into Health, Strength, Endurance, Shooting, Stealth, First Aid, and Lock Picking.

This RPG-like element, however, is a little confusing. As you successfully complete missions, your surviving officers will gain ranks, earn medals, and receive small increases to their abilities. You will take up to four men to different hotspots throughout the world during WWII, from Norway to Africa to Burma and elsewhere, dealing with Italian fascists and the Japanese as well as good old-fashioned Nazis. These are elite fighters trained for countless types of weapons and stealth combat. HD2 tells the story of a crack team of officers from the British SAS (Special Air Service), an airborne insertion team whose job was (and is) to go deep behind enemy lines and make surgical strikes involving assassination, supply line disruption, espionage, and more.

Hidden and dangerous 2 savegame editor