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Genre: Real-Time Strategy Publisher: Square Enix Developer: Gas Powered Games Players: 1-8

By Lachlan (11th Mar 2010)

The RTS genre has been around for the best part of two decades, and for all the innovations in game play and graphics, it always seems like somebody hasn’t gotten the memo. Despite a few concessions to modernity, Supreme Commander 2 has sprung fully-formed from a portal to the late-nineties, from a time when harvesting the resources needed to build up an unstoppable army of soulless killing machines was king of the block.

The last few titles from developer Gas Powered Games have all been disappointing on some level. Space Siege was embarrassingly generic, while Demigod showed promise as a multiplayer title, only to be crippled by astoundingly poor match-making and a distinct lack of customisation. In many ways, Supreme Commander is the company’s flagship series, originally touted as the spiritual successor to the ‘90s RTS Total Annihilation, also designed by Gas Powered CEO Chris Taylor.

The basic concept driving Supreme Commander is pretty simple – take everything you’d find in a title like Command and Conquer 3, and blow it up by a factor of one hundred. Where other games might give you the resources to field a few dozen units at any one time, to win a game of Supreme Commander you needed to have a few dozen factories, churning out hundreds of units at a constant clip. Maps were the size of small continents, leading to one of the game’s coolest innovations – the strategic zoom. There was an undeniable “wow” factor to the first time you rolled back the mouse wheel, zooming out all the way to a strategic overview of the entire map.

Calling Supreme Commander the successor to Total Annihilation is perhaps a little misleading. Advancements in technology notwithstanding, one of the big strengths of the original Total Annihilation was its accessibility. The game had personality to spare, and was surprisingly intuitive for new players trying it out for the first time. Even today the game still has a strong following – there aren’t many games from 1996 you can say that about. Perhaps unsurprisingly for such an ambitious strategy title, Supreme Commander didn’t quite deliver in this department.

Supreme Commander 2 attempts to redress this, stripping the game back considerably. Several features from the first title and its expansion Forged Alliance have been lost. The scale has also been reduced – the maps available both in the single-player campaign and in multiplayer are smaller, and fights never seem to involve quite as many units. While some concessions to fun and accessibility might not have been such a bad thing, it is a little disappointing to see both a sequel less ambitious than its predecessors, and a powerful game engine that isn’t being used to its full potential.



There are a few attempts to do something different in the single player campaign, which borrows a few elements from titles like World in Conflict. One memorable mission has you escorting dumb supertanks into an opponents’ base, all while they’re trying to do the same to you. Another has you capturing different points around the map to free political prisoners, before launching an assault on the main prison.

For all the narrative elements introduced, the game play in most levels boils down to the same thing – grinding away against the enemy’s defences with wave after wave of cannon fodder. Once they’re sufficiently eroded, you can then move on to accomplish your objective, which is normally destroying or capturing a specific unit. Every mission also has a few secondary objectives, which mostly relate to building certain units or researching new advancements in technology.

The graphics are passable, but a little more distinction between different units would have been nice. Everything tends to become an indistinct blob of colour when zoomed out halfway, and just like the first game, you’ll spend a lot of the time playing from the grand strategic view where strategic overlays tell you how many and what kind of units you have. The explosion and particle effects are nice, but aren’t really any great improvement on those found in the original game.



There are also a few issues with pacing. Some levels have long stretches where you’re not really doing anything, while others don’t give you long enough to accomplish objectives before throwing something new at you. Other levels pair you with an AI ally, who you’ll spend most of your time protecting. The role of narrative has been beefed up a bit from the previous titles, and you get the feeling that the developers really expected us to care about these characters and their relationships.

Set twenty-five years after the first game, the single-player campaign covers a new conflict from the perspective of three different commanders. Each of these individuals comes from one of the three different factions of the game’s universe. Unfortunately, the storytelling is pretty piss-poor even by video game standards. It’s not always clear why things are happening, or indeed what’s happening at all. The voice acting is passable, but there’s clearly been some messing around with the script near the end of development – one character switches between devil-may-care rogue to out-and-out Bond villain several times in the course of one level.

Indeed, small frustrations abound with Supreme Commander 2. While organising complicated build queues is easy once you get the hang of it, some of the interface decisions are a little odd. It requires more clicking than should be necessary to look up what units are being built at one of your factories, and not every unit is really worth building, while others are so mind-bogglingly useful as to be slightly imbalanced. The dreaded unskippable cutscenes make an appearance, and even though they preface each mission, I often found that they explained very little. There were also some minor stability issues – I had a few lockups and crashes to desktop in the first few missions. Overall performance was decent, which will be welcome news to anybody that tried to run the first game when it first appeared.



While the Supreme Commander universe is interesting enough, this probably isn’t the game that fans of the first instalments in the series were expecting. Really, Supreme Commander 2’s cardinal sin is that it offers less than the games it follows on from, and fans of the original titles are probably best served by continuing to play those.

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