Some ten years ago, a little game called Total Annihilation dropped out of the sky and blew away the RTS competition like a daisy-cutter bomb. A few expansion packs and gobs of user-created mods followed, but time eventually took its toll and TA faded into the cherished halls of nostalgia. Fans (such as myself) prayed for a Total Annihilation 2, but it seemed the franchise fell into some sort of legal vortex. Gamers know this is rarely a good sign.
Well, good news: Supreme Commander is TA2, only they couldn’t call it that. But any TA veteran who fires up SupCom will instantly recognize the distinct family traits. There are a ton of changes of course – better graphics, slicker interface, solid storyline … all the improvements you’d expect from 10 years of gaming evolution, and then some. The King has returned, and he doesn’t disappoint.
RTS goodness
At its core, SupCom is pretty simple: build a base, churn out an army of bots and whack the opponent until his base is a smoldering pile of rubble. There are land, sea and air units, carefully balanced in the usual rock-paper-scissors fashion. The three factions have slightly different specs for their tanks, artillery etc. but the real difference doesn’t show up until you get to the experimental weapons at the highest tech level. Again, pretty standard for the genre.
But what really makes SupCom stand out is the depth and polish. For one thing, rather than rely on the “build new base, accomplish mission, move to new map and repeat” concept, SupCom wisely goes the route of simply expanding the map as you accomplish tasks, saving you the hassle of creating the same basic power plants/flak guns/sentry cannons again and again.
This also ties into the changes in strategy. While a massive land rush worked great for the first part of the map, you may find yourself suddenly faced with a new target on an island. Doh! Better shift to naval and air production quickly, before the opponent gets too much of a head start building his defenses.
SupCom is a game of massive scales. Huge armies, huge maps and near-infinite strategies for completing each mission. It’d be hard to control all this without a good interface. Fortunately, they got it. Know all those little quirks that always make their way into otherwise good RTS games? I can honestly say it seems they fixed them. Every one.
Unit selection defaults to combat units when boxing a whole bunch. Setting up patrol routes is a breeze. When ferrying units across water, you can set the carrier to automatically pick up and drop off units once you’ve set the parameters. When upgrading a tech tree step, you can even place “pre-orders” for the newly available units and set waypoints for them before you’re anywhere done with the actual upgrade.
The list goes on and on. It’s clear GPG put a lot of thinking into all these crucial details, but the real showstopper is the map management. Traditional scroll-at-edge-of-screen works fine for small maps, but what about gigantic battlefields that would take a good 30 seconds to scroll from one end to the other?
The answer is a seamless zoom, not unlike Civilization IV or Black & White, except better. You still have a minimap (SupCom supports dual screens, if you so prefer) but who needs it? Constantly zooming in and out between hotspots using the mouse wheel becomes second nature within minutes, switching automatically between showing actual units vs. map symbols.
Even the best game has some chinks in its armor. SupCom seemed like the rare exception, but there is one thing that soon came to light: naval pathfinding. Granted, big ships don’t turn on a dime, but it is incredibly frustrating to need naval cannon support ASAP, only to have your ten perfectly capable ships not move at all because they’re stuck in some kind of mathematical gridlock further up the canal, except the three farthest away – who of course sets full sail in the OPPOSITE direction.
I suppose the logic is that they’re seeking an alternate route around the whole damn continent, but given the size of the maps that’d take about 10-15 mins. Still, this is a case where prudent math and realism should yield to playability.
Another minor downside is that it’s designed for the gaming rig of the future. That makes perfect sense in a way, except it’s a tad annoying for us who can’t blow five grand on the latest and greatest today. I tested the game on an AMD 4200+ dual core, twin nVidia 7600 GT 512 Mbs (SLI) and 1 Gb RAM – all well above minimum AND recommended specs. But sure enough, stuttering rears its ugly head when you’re running four players with a couple hundred units each.
Graphics, sound and such
It’s not a “pretty” game per se. In fact, you won’t spend any time fully zoomed in due to the intense action so you’ll spend most of your time commanding an army of ant-sized bots and/or hordes of little map symbols. Furthermore, the interface is quite chunky. Even on a 19 inch widescreen, you get a slightly claustrophobic feeling when there’s a battle raging but most of it is obscured by unit reports popping up at the bottom and headquarters issuing new orders in the top left corner.
But overall, the graphics are functional and fits the environment like a glove. Fancy, overproduced graphics would have made it an eye-killing mess. Any simpler and it’d be like a fugly turn-based hex strategy game. Thank heavens nobody came up with the idea of Manga graphics.
The voice acting is generally good, although a few of the actors try a little too hard and come across as having abdominal discomfort rather than being badass. Explosions and gunfire – 99% of the sounds you’ll find in SupCom – are satisfying, especially the awesome nuke.
Absolutely. The single-player campaign will keep you occupied for weeks, and you shouldn’t have any problems finding multiplayer opponents matching your skill level. A word of advice: learn to use the hotkeys or you’ll experience the RTS equivalent of teabagging. You just can’t move fast enough using only the mouse.
The original TA was heaven for modders, and it seems that philosophy holds true for SupCom. The first user-created maps are already starting to show up on the many fansites, and I expect quite a few innovative additions in the year ahead.
Bottom line: SupCom is the best RTS out there, period. Will Command & Conquer 3 be a worthy challenger for that title? Time will tell, but I know this: SupCom will deliver the goods for years to come.
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