[  « Previous Page | 1 | 2  ]

Wars are fought on land, sea and in the air.
Wars are fought on land, sea and in the air.Wars are fought on land, sea and in the air.

There are three main races to play as in the game: the UEF, a group of fragmented humans from Earth; the Aeon Illuminate, a cult of humans who follow a mysterious religion known as "The Way"; and the Cybran Nation, a faction of symbionts, which is basically a human with bits of robot implanted into its brain. On paper, these three factions sound incredibly varied and, indeed, their storylines and missions are as individual as can be. The only problem is they all look the same. Between the three factions, there is precious little difference between any of the units produced, land, sea, or air; even the commander units look incredibly similar. While this doesn't affect the gameplay too much, it certainly harms the aesthetics of the game, occasionally making battles feel bland, as well as making it nigh on impossible to tell units from two sides apart. Each of the sides has access to similar technology, at similar levels to each other, and base design is pretty much standard across all factions, with the only real difference being the experimental units each side has access to.

The missions in the campaign mode are impressively varied and offer a wide range of different objectives. No longer are missions simply "destroy the enemy base" or "capture points on the map", instead, you get set a series of increasingly varied objectives, from search and destroy, to flying an engineer to a base before a core explodes and then escorting vehicles as they evacuate the planet. Each and every objective has several ways to accomplish it and the decisions you make will rely heavily on how strong your forces are on each front. As an example, let's take the second mission from the UEF campaign. The second half of the mission, after the map expands, sees you having to escort and protect several civilian vehicles as they attempt to reach a base on the opposite side of the map. How you escort them is up to you. If you have control of the ground, you can attempt to slot them in between a mass of tanks and friendly units to distract fire away from them; however, there's every chance a flight of enemy bombers could fly over and wipe them out. If you control the skies, you can attempt to airlift them straight to the base. Whilst this may be a quicker method, it leaves your forces open to attack from the ground - the vehicles look very precarious dangling underneath one of your gunships - and all it'll take is a few shots from a mobile AA gun, and you'll have a lost a truck full of civilians.

 Advertisement

Each method is possible and you could even have a subtle balance between the two, either giving the vehicles on the ground air support or sending ground forces to protect the airlifted vehicles. It all depends how you want to do it and how you want to execute your strategies. Missions regularly last over two hours, with mission objectives constantly changing and forcing you to adjust your strategies, always keeping the action feeling fresh and new. However, the one thing that did get on my nerves was the incredibly steep learning curve - if you don't build your bases spot on or balance your forces perfectly, there's every chance the computer will just trounce you effortlessly. For added humiliation value, this usually won't happen until it's far too late for you to do anything, as the map expands for the final time, revealing a huge enemy base you didn't know about before, brimming with ready built units, waiting to decimate your own dwindling forces. Forgiving, Supreme Commander certainly is not, but experienced RTS players will likely savour the challenge.

Played over a LAN or the internet, Supreme Commander comes into its own and should prove to be popular with fans of TA. Giving you the ability to play against up to seven other human players (or a mixture of human and AI opponents, if you so wish), battles can be hotly contested, especially when each team has hundreds of units on their side. The maps have all been well designed for maximum multiplayer carnage and there is a huge variety to choose from, in a wide range of sizes for a variety of maximum players. Battles online can become absolutely manic, and balancing resources on all fronts whilst fending off attacks from seven human players is an adrenaline rush in itself. All online games have to be played through Gas Powered Games' own GPG.net front-end, which makes finding a game and playing a match a doddle, as well as hopefully preventing cheats from accessing and ruining any games.

The great visuals come at a huge priceThe great visuals come at a huge price

After the many things Supreme Commander does right, it's somewhat upsetting that when it comes to graphics you'll need an Über machine to really appreciate them. Whilst it is possible to make it run smoothly on older rigs, turning the graphics down by even one level will make the game look below par when compared to other titles on the marketplace. That's not to say it can't look great; on a modern gaming rig Supreme Commander is at the top of the genre, but so few people will be able to see the game running as the developer intended. Dual-monitor support is another nice feature, but it's another one that simply won't be used by the majority of players.

Graphical capabilities aside, possibly the most disappointing visual aspect of Supreme Commander is the interface. Clunky, and distinctly "old-school" when compared to the sheen found in games such as Company of Heroes, the interface here feels positively primeval and takes up much more of the screen than you'd imagine. While it is possible to turn it into a side-bar or even remove it altogether, to have access to the full feature set you really need to have the menu set at its most intrusive, and this is a big letdown.

While Supreme Commander may not change the way you play strategy games forever, it is a unique and robust title, with many inventive features and a fantastically imaginative single-player campaign. Its main innovation, the superb camera, while not without its flaws, offers you many strategic possibilities that simply aren't possible in any other RTS games, and the ability to zoom the camera out as far as possible is indeed revolutionary and one that will be sorely missed in other real-time strategies in the near future. With incredibly inventive mission objectives, a spectacular sense of scale and an overall feeling of strategy that puts other real-time strategies to shame, it seems the RTS wars are starting to heat up. With Supreme Commander having just fired the first, devastating, volley, it'll be interesting to see how C&C 3 can mount its counter-offensive.

[  « Previous Page | 1 | 2  ]