You spend a lot of time—a lot of, given the current state of the world, cathartic time—stabbing, shooting, and blowing up Nazis in Commandos: Origins. From a top-down perspective, you issue orders to a half-dozen World War II soldiers, each one specialized in disciplines like sniping or explosives. The encampments your commandos must infiltrate are sprawling, each minimap splattered with red dots that signify the droves of enemies capable of sounding the alarm. The game’s single most difficult obstacle, though, is the fundamental imprecision of your elite commandos when they fumble to carry out your orders.

Imprecision is death to the subgenre of real-time stealth tactics, where a perpetual ticking clock reminds you to quicksave so that you can try again when things inevitably go sideways. These games aren’t about getting things right the first time but getting them right eventually. Because all the failures contribute...