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Supreme Commander 2
Please refer to the sticky thread before you post in this thread.
This is your chance to tell us your opinion on Supreme Commander 2 due for release on March 5th.
Reviews/Opinions will be published on the main gaming channel. We'll let you know in this thread when they go live.
Thanks!
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Re: Supreme Commander 2
Three years ago, Supreme Commander gave the RTS world a shot in the arm with its immensely detailed economic system, interoperable full-3D and tactical viewpoints and hard-to-obtain but game-changing “experimental” super-units. Swathes of generic strategies were swatted aside as gamers flocked to find out what all the fuss was about – but it was polarising to say the least… for every fanatic, there were far more who found it too involved and gave up. Recognising this, Gas Powered Games have acquiesced, reducing the complexity in the hope of reaching out to a wider audience.
Sending a fighter over to the enemy base on scouting duties, you’ll notice an invasion force of tanks with protective armour boosters and anti-air units preparing to head down the coast and attack you. Having focussed all your efforts on constructing an experimental, your defences aren’t up to the task. Quickly, you invest your hard-earned research points in a powerful battleship, rush to the shipyard, prepare two for combat, and put them on a course to intercept. The hapless coastal invasion force is equipped with little long range weaponry, and is soon decimated by the battleships’ enormous missile batteries. In retaliation, you send your experimental giant robot in the opposite direction, supported by your now-experienced battleships. Just as you close in to the enemy base, destroying all defences in your path with the experimental’s gigantic laser, you suddenly discover that you’d missed their gigantic flying saucer – but by now it’s inside your base… with no anti-air and no time to react, your Armoured Command Unit (ACU) is taking heavy fire. It’s too late to save it – did you research the ACU upgrade to keep its nuclear core stable? As the enormous mushroom cloud rips through your base, you recall that you’d spent the points researching the battleships instead. It’s certainly all-action, and if you’re in the midst of an exciting and challenging game then it’s extremely engrossing and a lot of fun to play.
That however, won’t be how you’re introduced to the game. Supreme Commander 2 doesn’t have a particularly detailed manual, and it transpires fairly rapidly that the mission-based campaign serves as a tutorial. After a few basic instructions on how to move units, construct buildings, and avoid treading on innocent civilians in your ACU, you’re hurled straight into the captivating rollercoaster that is the United Earth Federation campaign. Except it’s neither of those things. The missions are heavily restricted, with fixed, regimented environments and consequently only one or two viable tactics, and the player is further shoehorned with limited research options. Presumably designed to break the casual audience into the tech tree gently, before slowly ramping up to the full tree at the end of the campaign, at first glance this isn’t such a bad thing. When you advance onto the Illuminate missions however, only to see your tree restricted again, and a first mission easily completed with a single bank of anti-tank and anti-air guns, it becomes extremely frustrating. Admittedly, there are some small differences between the factions’ tech trees, and some variation between each faction’s units, but is it really necessary to spoon-feed the player to such an extent? If this was just a brief tutorial, then it would make perfect sense – but it isn’t. It’s the sole scripted single-player experience – 6 hours of play for each of the three factions if you take things slowly – and its sole purpose appears to be a lesson in how the factions differ.
Then we come to the story. Obviously it’s one of the main components here, tying all of the missions together, and it’s told primarily through each of the commanders’ close allies who advise them during the missions through video feeds. The voice acting is fairly passable, but the scriptwriting is shockingly bad at times. You’ll be watching a cut-scene, with only minutes until the enemy arrives, when your commander asks for a recap of the mission. The advisor obliges, and goes through the entire minutiae of who the enemy are, why you are at war with them, what your motivation is for fighting, and probably mentions your favourite sandwich filling just for the hell of it, to the point where you ignore everything they say. It’s plainly obvious that the commander would already be well aware of these facts, making you feel entirely disconnected with the character and thus the story. When, half-way through the game, you realise that you have utterly no idea who is fighting who and why, you wonder whether there’s a problem. When you realise that you don’t care either, you know there’s a problem.
With the restricted research options, limited mission scope, and hugely irritating (and unskippable) cut-scenes, once you’ve completed the missions, there’s no way you’d play any of them again through choice. As a result, I feel confident in stating that there isn’t a worthwhile single-player mode. Yes, you can play skirmish matches with CPU opponents, and the AI is fairly decent for the most part, but it doesn’t scale up properly; however high you put the difficulty setting, you will always reach a point where your defences and troops can repel the most vicious of enemy attacks, and the AI won’t increase the pressure any further – instead of coming up with a new tactic, they just keep rebuilding and resending the same ineffective attack force.
Effectively then, Supreme Commander 2 is a multiplayer game for the most part – and to be fair to Gas Powered Games, they’ve invested a lot of time into their online system. Rush timers can be set to pen units inside their bases, preventing players from falling victim to enemy tanks before they’ve got their base up and running, there are a range of customisation options so you can play land-only battles or ban experimentals from combat, and there’s a huge variety of maps to choose from. Of course though, there’s always one big problem with online play – how likely is it that you’ll get the “exciting and challenging game” I mentioned earlier? As things stand, I’d say that maybe a quarter of the matches are actually enjoyable. The other three times, you’ll have an inept ally who shouldn’t have bothered turning up; a pair of enemies who team up their ACUs on yours 25 seconds into the game; and a commander who disconnects when they realise the battle isn’t going their way... or when they remember they’re about to miss an episode of Jeremy Kyle. Naturally, this isn’t something you can pin on the developer – but it’s nothing new in the strategy genre, and is precisely why a good single player mode is a necessity.
If you are lucky to find a couple of decent opponents, the rest comes down to the gameplay itself – and I’ve got to say, it’s a cracker. The units are generally well-balanced, the research tree is well thought out, with sufficient options to make the game interesting without becoming confusing, the experimentals are great fun to deploy in battle, and there’s sufficient depth to keep a match competitive from beginning to end without degenerating into a “who can build the most tanks” battle with air, naval and land units, long-range artillery, experimentals, and ultimately nuclear weapons keeping the tactics fresh. I could easily end the review here, focussing on the plus points of the gameplay, but Supreme Commander 2 always leaves me feeling a little bit dissatisfied.
The problem is that Supreme Commander was a trendsetter. It didn’t follow the well-trodden path that other strategy games had gone down – it dared to stand out and be different. When following up a game like that, Gas Powered Games were always going to struggle. They had only two ways to progress: if they’d copied the original, they would’ve lost the uniqueness that won them so many plaudits, but if they’d tried something new and experimental again, they would’ve seriously risked alienating their core support. Inexplicably, they ignored those two, and elected instead to go backwards and copy the “generic strategy game” model – simultaneously losing the uniqueness of the first and risking alienating their core support.
Gone are the complicated economics of the first, replaced instead with basic mass and energy collection and near-limitless storage – and whilst mass “mines” are rare on the map and imply the need to expand your territory and capture them, you quickly discover that energy is produced by cheap, unlimited power stations, and is easily converted into mass. Not particularly awe-inspiring. Gone are the mind-blowing experimentals that were a huge gamble, took a massive amount of preparation, and could tear opposing armies to shreds, replaced by inferior equivalents that are easier and quicker to produce, feel much less satisfying to deploy, and are much less of a threat. Gone are the monolithic battles that defined Supreme Commander, with opponents striving to gain a grip over the battlefield endlessly until they developed a winning strategy, poured all of their resources into it, and ultimately delivered a game-ending hammer blow. These do have the desired effect, making the game much easier to master and far quicker to play, but it’s at too high a cost. Something in between the two extremes was needed here, but the balance just isn’t there.
Ultimately, Supreme Commander 2 is well worth playing, but only if you’re a fan of multiplayer. The hashed-together single-player component is a massive let-down, and the gameplay is too generic for my liking, but there’s a lot here to enjoy if you’re prepared to play around the limitations.
Platform: PC
Score: 7.5 out of 10
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Re: Supreme Commander 2
Nice Jim,
I'll put this up tomorrow.