Hidden & Dangerous: Action Pack

I have a soft spot for pre-millennium tactical games that trusted players to fail spectacularly and figure out why, and Hidden & Dangerous earns its place in that category without much argument. This Action Pack bundles the original 1999 Illusion Softworks release with its expansion, Fight for Freedom (released as Devil's Bridge in the US), giving you a substantial block of content rooted in British SAS operations across WWII Europe. It is not a comfortable game. It was not designed to be. The core loop runs something like this: you select a four-man squad from a roster of 40 international commandos, kit them out with period-accurate weapons, explosives, and surveillance gear, study your mission briefing, and then try very hard not to get everyone killed in the first two minutes. The overhead tactical map is the key decision-making tool here, letting you plot movements and synchronize maneuvers before stepping back into direct control. Toggling between squad members in real time adds a layer of micro-management that rewards patience over aggression. The level environments range from sniper-packed forests and underground tunnels to night-time villa infiltrations, and the variety holds up surprisingly well across the campaign. Vehicle control is in the mix too, which was an ambitious addition for the era. Where the game shows its age most visibly is in its controls and AI. The interface is clunky by any modern standard, the enemy AI oscillates between suspiciously dormant and brutally reactive, and newcomers who skip the mission briefings will find themselves reset to a checkpoint they wish existed. There is no modern tutorial, no waypoint system nudging you toward objectives. That design philosophy will read as hostile to players raised on post-2010 action games. Read it the other way, though, and it is the exact kind of friction that makes a successful mission feel earned. The Fight for Freedom expansion adds three new campaigns, nine missions, new soldiers, vehicles, and weapons, with scenarios anchored around the strategic bridge battles of the war's later stages. The Steam community has kept a small but committed player base around this package since its 2017 re-release, with guides covering configuration tweaks, multiplayer setup via DirectPlay (technically workable on modern Windows with the right steps), and even localization patches for several languages. The modding footprint is modest compared to something like Close Combat or the later Hidden and Dangerous 2, but it is present. The 80 percent positive rating on Steam, drawn from a small but genuine sample, reflects a player base that knew what they were buying. If you have any tolerance for late-1990s PC tactical design, this pack is a reasonable way to spend an afternoon understanding where squad-based games came from. Expect to lose soldiers, reload often, and derive disproportionate satisfaction from a clean extraction. Players who want modern UI polish or active developer support should look elsewhere. But if the words "four-man SAS team, no waypoints, WWII" read as a feature list rather than a warning, this one holds up.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

Be the first to comment on Hidden & Dangerous: Action Pack.