Vitals
- Products: Supreme Commander 2
- Genres: Strategy
- Subchannels: Xbox 360, PC
- ESRB Rating: E10+
- Developer: gas powered games
- Release Date (US) - Xbox 360: March 16, 2010
- Release Date (US) - PC Games: March 2, 2010
- Publisher: Square-Enix
We are gathered today to remember Supreme Commander, born in 1997 under the name Total Annihilation. This enfant terrible of the RTS world bucked the trend of Command & Conquer and WarCraft clones to provide something sprawling, meticulous, and without much personality. It changed its name in 2007 to Supreme Commander, but it wasn't fooling anyone. It was still that same Total Annihilation rebel, playing by its own rules, casual RTSers be damned.
Today the Supreme Commander you knew and possibly loved has died.
Click the image above to check out all Supreme Commander 2 screens.
Okay, maybe not "died" because there's nothing to stop you from playing a three-year-old RTS. But fans of its unique approach to the genre are in for a rude awakening if they expect Supreme Commander 2 to fall neatly in line with its predecessors. The finicky economy and energy management are gone. The vast maps are no more, and familiar expanses have shrunk down to almost ridiculously intimate proportions. The far-ranging game of cat-and-mouse is a thing of the past. You don't park overhead like a satellite to watch swarms of teensy shuffling icons. Instead, you've got a mostly traditional real-time strategy game that has a lot in common with Command & Conquer 3.
Yeah, that's right. I just said Supreme Commander 2 has a lot in common with Command & Conquer 3, and here's the kicker: I didn't mean it as an insult. This is a back-to-the-basics, charming, lively, action-oriented RTS about making important, broad decisions and enjoying the ensuing spectacle. It plays fast, it throws units headlong into combat, and it'll be over soon enough that you can jump right into your next match. It's even got elegance and character -- two things mostly foreign to this series -- that remind me of Gas Powered Games' energetic Demigod.
The campaign is terrible as anything other than an incentive to try specific units in heavily scripted situations. The skirmish AI is serviceable, but it feels unfinished. Even on the hardest difficulty level, it does stupid broken things like charging engineers into enemy armies, building a transport fleet without anything to transport, or parking a respectable army off to one side and then dribbling out a few units at a time. The replay mode needs some work if it's going to be a useful tool. Multiplayer is this game's best hope for a long happy life, but without a ranking system or some provision for an online community, it's going to have a tough time holding out against Starcraft II and Command & Conquer 4.
Which is a real shame, because the delightful surprise about Supreme Commander 2 is that it deserves a place at the table with other crowd pleasers. At last, here is a sleek, accessible, spirited RTS where "robot" doesn't have to be a dirty word for units without personality. I love how the Cybran engineers unfurl their pincers and waddle like headcrabs from Half-Life 2. The Illuminate assault bots with standards mounted on their domed backs look like samurai. The AC-1000 gunship doing its deadly AC-130 orbit is a delight to watch. You can build a giant snail, a kraken that's actually a kraken, a bad-ass dinosaur, and a couple of flavors of giant vacuum cleaners. After years of making games that were the epitome of the generic, Gas Powered Games got wonderfully creative. First Demigod, and now this? Here, at last, the developer proves they can do things differently or they can do things conventionally, and they can do both of them very well.
Originally published on 1UP.com.
