((Feel free to tell me how I could make my reviews better))
First let me start out by saying that the only knowledge I had of Supreme Commander came from playing Supreme Commander Forged Alliance, a superb RTS with a massive scale and 4 unique factions. Having decided I liked the series I picked up Supreme Commander 2 and the results are less then good.
Supreme Commander 2 features 3 factions, each with their own 6 mission campaign. The story is nothing great, and you have to play the campaigns in order where as Forged Alliance let you pick which of 3 factions (the 4th was reserved to play the role of the bad guys) you wanted to play and put you through the same missions whichever faction you picked. The characters are very dull, I couldn't identify with any of them partly because they have so little dialog and partly because they are so predictable you can easily guess what they're going to say. If you manage to make it to the end though, you learn of some shocking bits that bring closure to each of the three campaigns.
But surely the gameplay can make up for cliched story, right? Well it seems Square Enix (Yes, the maker's of Final Fantasy do make RTS') has dumbed down the gameplay since the first game in an attempt to make it more accessible for everyone. The first Supreme Commander featured 3 tiers of units with a special 4th tier consisting of expiramental units, massively time and resource consuming units that can sometimes win the battle by themselves. With Supreme Commander 2 we instead have a tech tree which upgrades your basic units and unlocks experimentals. Additionally the games coding was streamlined to make it run better on even lower end PCs.
The experimentals tend to be the highlight of this series, big units that can take 15 minutes to build and can stomp all over the enemy's base. For Supreme Commander 2 the experimentals
are now a lot cheaper and quicker to produce. While this means battles can get more epic more quickly it also removes a lot of the satisfaction at having just broken your economy so you can break an enemy's balls. The results of this new take on experimentals can be summed up by the following screenshot.
Also the new experimentals are worse then the old ones. For example, the Atlantis 2 submarine/aircraft carrier hybrid can carry 25 aircraft. The Atlantis from Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance can carry 150 aircraft. Shouldn't the Atlantis 2, suppossedly an improvement, be better then the original instead of the other way around?
I want you to notice something in that screenshot, look at the unit cap. A mere 300 units compared to the 500 (or 1000 in skirmish) of Forged Alliance. To the left of that you also see that resources are now spent differently. In Forged Alliance a unit had a cost and you paid that over time while that unit was being built. In SC 2 you pay it up front so there's no longer a constant drain. This system is also reflected by the shield generator. In Forged Alliance it could take up to 500 energy to keep a shield running. Now you can run an infinite number with no drain whatsoever making the structure really overpowered.
The AI is one of the game's major flaws. Take for example the first mission of the demo.
It was mainly a naval mission and I think the AI can be summed up as follows.
*checks locations for destroyers and gunships*
*if no destroyers or gunships present send replacements*
*if destroyers and gunships present send small squadron of fighter/bombers at enemy*
That's it, it's the simplest AI I've ever dealt with. It just sends waves of units at you while making sure to replace any you destroy. This can make battles far too easy to the point it's just boring.
Consider this final bit of information. I paid $60 for Supreme Commander 2. I found the original Supreme Commander at Target for $10. It seems in their quest to make Supreme Commander 2 more accessible to more players they have succeeded in removing everything their original fanbase enjoyed. Gone are the long building times, unit tiers, the Aeon navy (all "Illuminate" tanks hover so they don't get a navy), resource drain, massive maps (the biggest map left is a roughly 20km by 20km map where as Forged Alliance maps can be 4 times that size), and the serephim (they were removed as part of the story but couldn't we get a new alien race instead of some half assed rogue from one of the existing factions?). If you like big complicated RTS games go for Supreme Commander for $10 and have more fun and more money in your wallet then if you went for Supreme Commander 2.
This game bombs big time
First let me start out by saying that the only knowledge I had of Supreme Commander came from playing Supreme Commander Forged Alliance, a superb RTS with a massive scale and 4 unique factions. Having decided I liked the series I picked up Supreme Commander 2 and the results are less then good.
Supreme Commander 2 features 3 factions, each with their own 6 mission campaign. The story is nothing great, and you have to play the campaigns in order where as Forged Alliance let you pick which of 3 factions (the 4th was reserved to play the role of the bad guys) you wanted to play and put you through the same missions whichever faction you picked. The characters are very dull, I couldn't identify with any of them partly because they have so little dialog and partly because they are so predictable you can easily guess what they're going to say. If you manage to make it to the end though, you learn of some shocking bits that bring closure to each of the three campaigns.
But surely the gameplay can make up for cliched story, right? Well it seems Square Enix (Yes, the maker's of Final Fantasy do make RTS') has dumbed down the gameplay since the first game in an attempt to make it more accessible for everyone. The first Supreme Commander featured 3 tiers of units with a special 4th tier consisting of expiramental units, massively time and resource consuming units that can sometimes win the battle by themselves. With Supreme Commander 2 we instead have a tech tree which upgrades your basic units and unlocks experimentals. Additionally the games coding was streamlined to make it run better on even lower end PCs.
The experimentals tend to be the highlight of this series, big units that can take 15 minutes to build and can stomp all over the enemy's base. For Supreme Commander 2 the experimentals
are now a lot cheaper and quicker to produce. While this means battles can get more epic more quickly it also removes a lot of the satisfaction at having just broken your economy so you can break an enemy's balls. The results of this new take on experimentals can be summed up by the following screenshot.
I want you to notice something in that screenshot, look at the unit cap. A mere 300 units compared to the 500 (or 1000 in skirmish) of Forged Alliance. To the left of that you also see that resources are now spent differently. In Forged Alliance a unit had a cost and you paid that over time while that unit was being built. In SC 2 you pay it up front so there's no longer a constant drain. This system is also reflected by the shield generator. In Forged Alliance it could take up to 500 energy to keep a shield running. Now you can run an infinite number with no drain whatsoever making the structure really overpowered.
The AI is one of the game's major flaws. Take for example the first mission of the demo.
*checks locations for destroyers and gunships*
*if no destroyers or gunships present send replacements*
*if destroyers and gunships present send small squadron of fighter/bombers at enemy*
That's it, it's the simplest AI I've ever dealt with. It just sends waves of units at you while making sure to replace any you destroy. This can make battles far too easy to the point it's just boring.
Consider this final bit of information. I paid $60 for Supreme Commander 2. I found the original Supreme Commander at Target for $10. It seems in their quest to make Supreme Commander 2 more accessible to more players they have succeeded in removing everything their original fanbase enjoyed. Gone are the long building times, unit tiers, the Aeon navy (all "Illuminate" tanks hover so they don't get a navy), resource drain, massive maps (the biggest map left is a roughly 20km by 20km map where as Forged Alliance maps can be 4 times that size), and the serephim (they were removed as part of the story but couldn't we get a new alien race instead of some half assed rogue from one of the existing factions?). If you like big complicated RTS games go for Supreme Commander for $10 and have more fun and more money in your wallet then if you went for Supreme Commander 2.
