by Andrius Davydauskas

Created on: May 09, 2009

Supreme Commander is an RTS game from Gas Powered Games . It had a large amount of hype and didn't fully live up to the expectations, but is still a fairly good RTS with many interesting features.

The story is really simple . Three factions fighting for the control of the galaxy for personal beliefs, power, freedom or some other simple reason . The campaign is only about 18 missions long, but each mission takes about 3 hours to complete so you will be occupied for quite some time before you finish it . The bad part is that the objectives are not very interesting and really simple. Destroy the enemy or defend . The skirmish isn't that fun either . The AI is poor and can be a cakewalk even on the expert settings .

The two different resources you need to worry about are energy and mass . Energy is made by power plants which you build yourself anywhere on the map, but mass extractors can only be built on specific points that are spread out on the map . The unit range,just like everything else in the game, is huge . Tanks , mechs , jets , bombers , gunships , spyplanes , battleships , moblie artilery , submarines , flying saucers , you name it . The tech tree is huge too, but the only unit that can be upgraded is the commander which is quite disappointing .

What does make this game shine is the multiplayer . The ammount of strategic and tactical decisions that can be made is mindblowing . The controls are some of the best I've seen in an RTS . The zooming camera lets you focus on the whole map as wellas any small battle . The unit maneuvering and building queue are easy to use but all of this is hard to get used to and create a pretty steep difficulty curve at first which discourages new players . The unit pathfinding is also a big problem. Tanks get stuck behind each other and take forever to get to their destination .

In my opinion, the worst thing about Supreme Commander is that its a game for the "hard-core" RTS players . Most of the time you play from the strategic view and all you see are little squares and triangles representing certain units . The unit design is great, but you never have time to zoom in and look at them .

Overall Supreme Commander is one of the best RTS games when it comes to scale and strategy , but be prepaired for a big difficulty curve . This is not a game for the casual gamer, but if you are looking for strategy , you came to the right place.

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