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Supreme Commander Review (continued)
More User Submitted Supreme Commander Reviews
Date: 2008-04-02
Good, but basic
The 'skirmish' (botmatch) feature is pretty good, and the game is solid overall. I've run into a few crashes on one of the larger maps, when 7 bots are running (total of 8 players), but have had no problems, otherwise.
The replay value of the skirmishes is not great, mostly because the game lacks 'atmosphere.' I think this is mostly a shortcoming of the massive zoom capability; zooming all the way out makes coordinating units much easier, but it also means that you're only ever looking at very simplified graphics. Older games limited the user's ability to zoom out, which had the paradoxical side benefit of forcing the user to interact with the optimized graphics. If the gameplay is going to compel the player to zoom out in order to take advantage of the strategic value, then the game needs to compensate by optimizing the graphics and audio for the zoomed-out perspective.
Some variation among the units used by the different factions would have been nice. The vehicles and towers are virtually identical, compared with, say, Warcraft or Dark Reign 2, which featured unique and synthesized units across the different factions.
Finally, the fabrication and assault animations are relatively simplistic and cartoony. There are older games with more primitive graphics that have done it better.
Date: 2008-03-20
Once the hype died...
After a while I begin to wonder just what it was about this game that got me going thinking it was gonna be the greatest thing when I considered that Starcraft 2 might never be a reality. That much has changed now with SC2 only a few months away (maybe longer if we know Blizzard LOL!) and it would seem like if you were looking for RTS elsewhere, Supreme Commander suits just that... for about an hour or two. I'll be honest, when I first got the game, I was psyched to have a successor to Total Annihilation. Though not quite made by Cavedog Entertainment, that may be where it's downfall was but that's speculation.
I remember more than 10 years ago how I would spent countless hours and sleepless nights playing Total Annihilation because it set itself apart from most RTS's in the the only unique way it could. SIZE! TA was a massive upscale for combat and touched base on every aspect of strategy for you. What Red Alert did in the same time, Total Annihilation exceeded that and gave you even more.
This may be due in part to the nature of what gaming has become today, where it's not so much a commodity but a competition and that strategies for... well... 'strategy games' have changed. Who can zerg who the fastest. Who can win the battle and claim the war is theirs also? It would seem the FPS element of striking hard, fast and unrelentlessly has diminished the key factor of what made RTS games what they were meant to be played by. Implementing defense AND strategy-- but now I'm just beating a dead horse. Onto the main contemplation at hand.
Supreme Commander is a game that's awesome... 5 years ago. Its kindred spirit to Total Annihilation can be found but definitely not felt by any measure as far as I can say. Even with the epic-sized experimental units you can construct, they still feel nothing like what the Arm's KROGOTH unit in Total Annihilation felt... pure and UTTER destruction where it was limitlessly unstoppable; and had you found out your enemy was constructing one of these gargantuans wasn't just a threat, it was a death wish waiting to happen and you suddenly create your own agenda and scenario to seek out AND DESTROY ALL ATTEMPTS!
This results in a problem Supreme Commander faces; the gaming utopian. Where gamers respect one another in elements to give each other a fighting chance in the not-so FPS standard and play the game out like a fancy chess game; you outsmarted your opponent with the same exact pieces, nothing more, nothing less, so I want to hear NOTHING about rushing being a strategy, that's not the point. You ever seen a chess player rush someone's king with pawns? Exactly. Supreme Commander fits under that feel where it's expected, though never quite lived up to tell the tale of each other's epic sized sci-fi battles where one side reaped so much victory over another, and how the tides could be quickly turned by the tap of an unnoticed force that was amassed earlier on that would ultimately save the losing side's game resulting in one hell of a turn up. Supreme Commander was meant for that standard, it just doesn't exist; if it does, you're one very lucky person to meet such people with particular standard.
Where I'm trying to go with this is that Supreme Commander was an affluently designed concept years behind. It marks back to a time when gaming was much simpler, and while I respect that, not alot of people seem to respect it in the same way. In turn, this game probably doesn't feel out long hour games via multiplayer I imagine, where most RTS games shine in their competitiveness, and you'll most likely get rushed before your hopes of a Star War movie style battle could happen. Remember the trailer gameplay scenes this game had a long while back? Who plays games like that against another person? I'd sure like to... it just doesn't happen.
In contrast, this review merits two rankings with me. As a game itself, I give it 3 engineer bots out of 5 for being an extremely hyped game that fooled me to begin with. However, in other likes, I give it a 5 KBOTS delivered out of 5 for being that kindred spirit to Total Annihilation... because I doubt we'll see any rendition of a TRUE successor to TotalAnn for a very, VERY long time, if at all... and somehow that feels like it's for the best. Some things were just best to sit in the rests of time and collects to that particular moment when "You should have been there when it was."
Supreme Commander isn't all out a 'bad' game, I do enjoy it for what it's worth, and perhaps there are a margin of people who do continue to enjoy this kind of gameplay. Maybe my own tastes in RTS have changed, but so have alot of innovations in the RTS genre, with so many blistering sub-genres you don't even know where to begin or what to consider strategy games anymore. I do however remember what strategy games felt like; and there was a magnum opus for them back in the mid/late-1990's. Here's hoping a revival to that comes again, it just definitely isn't now nor here.
Date: 2008-02-02
Best Real Time Strategy Game this year!
Excellent interface. Plays fast and keeps you involved. It demands a lot of power, so expect to upgrade your system if you are not up to date (today is Jan 2008). You'll need at least a 2GHz processor with a Gig of ram (unless you made the mistake of buying Vista. Then you'll need a 3GHz processor and 2 Gig of RAM). The graphics are top notch so make sure that you have a gaming video card with 512Meg of RAM. I haven't found any bugs and have never locked up while playing, so the programmers did a great job. [Nothing like MicroShaft's "Age of Empires" -God, what an abortion that is!]
This has the feel of StarCraft with better animation and far more challanging computer simulation. There are three waring factions, each with their own tech upgrades. No need to sit and read the manual, just jump in and play the tutorial for a few minutes and your ready to go.
If you are only going to buy one game this year, get this one!
Date: 2007-12-29
The game title is wrong. Should be "Supreme Economist"
There are a few very excellent gameplay reviews about SupCom here in Amazon so I guess I can conveniently skip that.
Here I want to talk about more about other aspect:
1: Technically broken. This game technically broken. Only the last patch renders my game playable online. Before that, all my online matches consist of hangs and crashes and famous "quiet time bug". Amazingly, single player is fine.
If you installed some mod or other stuff, remember to remove them EACH TIME you install a patch and WAIT FOR UPDATED MOD.
GPGnet patch is a pain. Usually you have to download the patch manually and run it to prevent patching bugs that make you unable to run GPGnet.
I'm running Vista on a decent setup: Intel Core Duo, 2GB RAM and 7900GS graphic card. Now stop thinking Vista sucks because if you think this way you obviously never tried Vista. I'm using Vista now and I can tell you I run all my games without any problem.
2: Master of Economics. By reading the community forums, you'll soon discover that top players always chanting that this game is not about strategy, it's about economics. All forum posts about balancing/tactics/strategy are calculations of Mass/Energy consumption and cost/performance ratio.
Now this is confusing. I bought this game for RTS, Real-Time Strategy. I understand economic is important but why it is more important than tactic/strategy? By watching top players replays, I realized why don't Chris Taylor rename this game to SupEcom?
This, together with some other excellent reviews here in Amazon, should give you some insight about general players' experience.
Date: 2007-12-13
Big HUD
This game might have been interesting but for two specific reasons...the tutorials have been poorly implemented. This I am willing to overlook but the size of the HUD definitely turned me off of this game. Compared to other RTS HUD, it is easily one of the largest ones (even on a high screen resolution) to the point that I feel it covers a portion of the terrain I need to see. One can counter by saying that that is why they offer the option to zoom out? Apart from the "grand scale" I have no pleasure in managing ants. Although Age of Empires 3 has a large HUD as default setting, it gives the option of seeing a more compressed HUD. Such an option in this game would have spoken volumes for me.
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