Supreme Commander
Here we are again, after a bit of a hiatus due to excessive traveling on my part. In between my trips to Nigeria, France (twice) and Shanghai I haven't had all that much time to try new games extensively. However I managed to acquire a cheap PSP in Shanghai and will be adding PSP games to my reviews. Coming soon: my review of Marvel Ultimate Alliance for the PSP.
But first the RTS that everyone's been waiting for: Supreme Commander.
Real Time Strategy isn't my most favorite genre (shooters have that distinction) but they're up there, and while I don't play every RTS title that hits the shelves I do make an effort to give the big names a try. A couple of years ago I totally lost myself in Total Annihilation for a few weeks, and as its spiritual successor Supreme Commander was a promising title from the start.
First off, the system requirements. Due to several novel features, huge playing maps, and full 3D rendering of everything in the game, you'll need a pretty heavy PC to run it all. I have an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ with a GeForce 7600GT and 1 GB of RAM, and while SC ran smooth on most levels in the single player campaign, the later missions did have frequent stutters. The game remained playable though and the framerate decrease never frustrated me.
The high demands the game makes of your PC can easily be forgiven when you realize what the game offers. The maps are huge, there can be literally hundreds or thousands of units in the field at any one time, and all projectiles (shells, missiles, debris) have their own trajectories. Combine this with a fairly intelligent AI that governs all those units, and you come up with a game that not only pushes your graphics card to the limit, but your CPU most of all.
Supreme Commander is heralded as a landmark in RTS games, and it's hard to disagree with this statement. Its most revolutionary feature is not the sheer scale of the game, but its superb zooming function. You can seamlessly zoom in to a single unit to admire its smooth textures, and then zoom out until you see the whole map with units and buildings as icons. This 'strategic zoom' is fluid and works so well that most of the time you won't scroll the view to see a different area, you'll just zoom out and zoom back in to where you want to see the action. Thanks to this feature you'll never lose track of what's happening. You have continually full overview of the conflict raging on the screen, and regardless of how massive the battles become you will always remain in control over your units.
The strategic zoom gives you the amount of control that makes it possible to wage such enormous battles. In any other RTS game fighting on such a huge scale is an impossible task, as you quickly lose track of what's happening and where. Supreme Commander makes it possible, and in such a fantastic way that you wonder why no one else has done this before.
Some other great features in SC are the excellent building queue system, the unit/group command system that allows you to queue commands and movement options, and a nice ferry system that allows you to automatically airlift units to distant locations on the map as soon as they come rolling out of your factories.
You can fight with three different factions, each with their own color scheme and aesthetic approach to units and buildings. The game works with four tech levels, each giving you new and better units. However each tech level is pretty similar in the type of units it provides compared to the other factions, and you don't get any truly unique units until the 4th level, the experimental units. Those are pretty cool though (the Cybran Monkey Lord rules), but they're also ridiculously expensive to build so you'll still have to form the core of your army around the same basic unit types. That's not much of a problem, but it does limit your options in terms of tactical variety. You will have the same basic army as your enemy regardless of what faction you play, which makes it challenging to come up with inventive uses of your units' capabilities.
The single player campaigns in Supreme Commander all have fairly straightforward storylines. They're fun to play through, but after one go with each faction you'll probably won't be returning to them. Still the campaigns serve their purpose of teaching you the game's basics and let you get to know each unit. Then you can move on to skirmishes against the AI, and once you've mastered those the real challenge of multiplayer games await you. Sure, you can skip the campaigns and skirmishes and go straight to the multiplayer mayhem, but you'll be served up as shish-kebab by any relatively experienced opponent so you'd do well to get to know the game first.
So is Supreme Commander really the landmark RTS game that the hype says it is? Well, yes. Mostly because of one thing, the zoom function, but all the other little innovations add up to make this game a superior RTS experience. Once you've played Supreme Commander you'll have a hard time adjusting to a RTS that doesn't have similar functionality, so the new Command & Conquer game that's just around the corner better have something good to bring to the table or it'll have lost the 2007 RTS fight before it's even truly begun.
Score: 9 out of 10.