The first of four difficulties, Cakewalk, is exactly what it sounds like. It’s where the pampered pretty-boys and patchouli pacifists go to play. Real men don’t pray for peace though. They flex their guns and make it happen with a “bring it on” growl. Suicide Mission is the real deal, made to separate the bubble-blowers from the stogie-biters. With tanks, grenades, and Gatling guns taking the place of the lemmings, you’ll need true grit to see the next stage with a single life to spare.

Weighing in with a scant five stages, Commando is short by all accounts, but it compensates with variety amid the carnage. One moment, The Jackals are blasting palm trees along the beach, and the next, riding the rapids, mounting turrets, and dodging bullets while side-stepping through minefields. Drivable tanks and hummers round out the action, but a whiskey-chugging blind man could steer those things better than me. The driving sections are mercifully short, and if you feel like an extra challenge you can always leap out and meet your enemy face to face.

Every stage packs at least one new enemy in for the slaughter, but the boss-fights are epically disappointing. Five stages should equal five bosses at minimum, and I expect to see massive monstrosities of flesh and metal twisting into an unholy grotesquerie of bullet-spewing tentacles (I’ve been playing too much Contra). Instead, we get two tanks and a final boss. The tanks are screen-filling dreadnoughts with an arsenal to match, but a repeated boss? That’s pathetic. At least the final boss is unique, even if it looks more like one of Dr. Wiley’s contraptions than a war machine.

If you can’t cut it as a one-man army, there’s room for three players with POWs to save and points to score for bragging rights. Competition is my favorite aspect of XBLA, but Commando missed the point. Anyone with time to kill and the patience to hole up and mow down the respawns is game for first place. If Capcom really wanted to fire up the leaderboards, they should have included scores for factors like completion times and longest combo streaks.

Even with its short length, lack of proper bosses, and unimpressive leaderboards, Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3 is the type of intense, man-tested Schwarzenegger-approved, dose of destruction that XBLA needs more of—it won’t replace AAA shooters like Gears of War or Call of Duty 4, but it doesn’t have to. Sometimes a quick, callous display of military mayhem is all you need to feel like a hero.

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