Supreme Commander 2

I'd like to introduce you to a character in Supreme Commander 2. His name is Dr. Brackman. He's the leader of the Cybran forces, one of the factions in the game.

Dr. Brackman's an interesting fellow, you see. He's a brain and spinal cord in a jar.

I bring up Brackman for a couple of reasons, namely that the attitude you need to bring into Supreme Commander 2 is that your brain needs to be in a metaphorical jar (not a literal one. Please don't sue us). Have you ever played one of those games where you have to concentrate on about a million things at once? SP2 is one of those games.

In case you weren't aware, the Supreme Commander series is the "spiritual successor" to the Total Annihilation franchise, which was one of, if not the best real-time strategy games from the Golden Era of RTSs. Total Annihilation featured unprecedentedly huge maps, alterations in terrain height, fully 3D modeled units, and a focus on online play that just wasn't seen all that much in the year 1999. That was a frenzied game, but more importantly, a fun one.

Total Annihilation's success (coupled with the success of its much bigger counterpart, Starcraft) pretty much guaranteed the downfall of the RTS as a commercially viable genre. People still play Starcraft competitively to this day. Why play any other RTS when these two games had pretty well nailed it down?

We haven't seen a new, major RTS franchise in years. For those still trying to get their RTS fix, you've got to turn to old standbys: Command and Conquer or Starcraft.

Unfortunately, I don't think Supreme Commander is the franchise to do it. I can appreciate the game for what it's trying to do, which is to offer a complex and involving RTS. But the amount of stress that this causes doesn't exactly make for a pleasant experience.

If you've got a more compartmentalized brain than I do, you might be able to handle the challenge of maintaining factories, repairing units, harvesting energy, researching technology, launching offensives and counter-offensives, maintaining perimetre defenses, and capturing checkpoints all at the same time, but I had some trouble with it. There's so many units, so many things to be doing all at once, and so many ways that missing a small key detail can bury you six feet under that it's mind boggling. For the hardcore RTS player, this might be a godsend, but as the type of person who still gets his ass handed to him playing against the computer in Starcraft, it was pretty daunting.

Luckily, the game does include a few options. The tutorial section is pretty poorly written and doesn't go in depth enough, but the campaign section of the game substitutes as a pretty gradual tutorial. Only by about the fourth or fifth mission in each campaign did I start to feel overwhelmed. Skirmishes on anything other than an easy level I had some serious trouble with, and don't even get me started on the online component – there are people out there who just want your head on a frickin' pike.

OK, so my troubles with difficulty aren't universal to be fair. There's obviously enough people out there who have a firm grasp on the game, so if you think that you can be one of those people, then I have no hesitations about recommending this game to you. For the more general player, though, there's a number of other problems with the game. For one, an RTS's story should be somewhat involving, or at least give an appropriate sense of epic scale. Unfortunately, Supreme Commander 2's story is laughably bad. As in, so bad you're laughing at the game. I'd be willing to forgive it this transgression if the game itself was campy in some way, but no – the gameplay is life or death, and deadly serious. So this is just a huge misstep.

Second, while I know that Total Annihilation wasn't exactly known for its differentiation in character models (both sides were just big robots, after all), the problem seems to have gotten worse in Supreme Commander 2. Besides some colour swaps, I found it pretty difficult to keep track of who was who. This is another example of why Starcraft is still such a great game – it's so easy to tell who's who because of really different unit types. Maybe Gas Powered Games was going for a "realistic" robot war situation (ha!), but it sure didn't seem like it – it kind of seemed like laziness. I think I'd prefer to have a slightly more human element to the game, and have some personality in the units.

Finally, I'm not convinced that fully rotatable 3D has done anything good for RTS gaming in general. Half of the game is spent playing the game, and the other half is spent just manipulating the camera. Total Annihilation got this right a decade ago – have 3D units on a 2D plane. It makes the strategizing so much less antagonizing. Not to mention that because of the monstrous scale of the levels, everything is just a little blip on the screen, so who needs full 3D anyways? It's not like you'll have the time to appreciate it.

Despite all of this, though, there were times when I had a lot of fun with Supreme Commander 2. I couldn't handle the stress a lot of the time, so it's not like it'll be a game I'll be pulling out all the time, but when I'm in the mood for some RTS action, it'll do. If this seems like your kind of game, I think you'll probably enjoy the hell out of it. Dive right in, smarty pants.