Deadly Dozen

I went in expecting a rough-around-the-edges tactical shooter with a few redeeming ideas, and that is more or less what Deadly Dozen delivers - with heavy emphasis on rough. Originally released in 2001 and built around the premise of commanding a four-man unit of military misfits through ten mission-based incursions into German-occupied territory, the core loop is genuinely interesting on paper. You pick up to four soldiers from a roster of twelve, each carrying distinct specializations - sniper, demolition expert, and others along those lines - load them with two weapons and three equipment items per soldier, then drop them into large open maps with objectives you can tackle in whatever order you choose. The mission structure has some real teeth: squad members who die are gone permanently across the campaign, which means each firefight actually carries weight and careless play compounds into a harder late-game. That permadeath system, combined with per-soldier gear allocation, is the closest this game gets to genuine tactical depth. The problem is that almost everything built around that core is fighting against you. Enemy AI has a persistent and frustrating habit of detecting your squad through terrain and at implausible distances, which tends to collapse careful stealth approaches into chaotic firefights before you have positioned properly. Your own squad AI follows basic orders - hold position, follow, attack - and can switch between first- and third-person perspectives at any point, and you can body-hop between soldiers at will. In practice, though, your squadmates regularly lose pathfinding coherence the moment a building or narrow corridor enters the picture. You will spend meaningful time babysitting a stuck rifleman instead of coordinating flanks. The Metacritic score of 56 from original critics tells you this was a divisive release even in 2001, and time has not smoothed out the friction points that earned those low marks. What about the Steam version specifically? This is the 2017 digital re-release, which added basic compatibility fixes for modern hardware and later received widescreen support via command-line parameters under Ziggurat's stewardship. No content was added, no AI was touched, no tutorial rework was done. You are playing a 2001 game with a slightly wider resolution ceiling. Steam user reviews sit at roughly 74 percent positive across a small sample, which suggests that the people buying it know exactly what they are getting into - veterans with a nostalgia account and a high tolerance for dated conventions. New players drawn in by the WWII tactical label will hit the wall much faster. From a strategy perspective, the ceiling here is low. There is no tech tree, no persistent progression outside of squad survival, no mod tooling accessible through Steam, and no multiplayer of any kind. What decision-making exists lives in pre-mission loadout selection and real-time positioning - choosing whether to send your sniper ahead solo while the rest of the squad holds, or using the demolition specialist to remove an obstacle rather than fight through it. That is a functional but shallow loop compared to what the genre offers today. If you have exhausted Commandos, Hidden and Dangerous, or Jagged Alliance and want to fill a historical gap, Deadly Dozen will scratch that itch briefly. For everyone else, this is a curiosity that respects neither your time nor your patience with legacy AI quirks.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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