Supreme or dismal?
From the creator of the futuristic RTS Total Annihilation comes Chris Taylor’s and Gas Powered Games latest foray into the genre. Supreme Commander is a futuristic RTS where commanders lead robotic units in a battle for overall supremacy between three warring factions, the Aeon, Cybran and the UEF.
Supreme Commander has been hyped across the board ever since it appeared at E3 in 2006, but when we initially took our first steps into the campaign we were under whelmed to say the least. Clicking on units, which resemble different shapes when zoomed out and pointing them to various positions on the battlefield failed to arouse any excitement. Hang on a minute; this is just another standard RTS, isn’t it? This isn’t helped by a fairly unimpressive training arena, which allows you to get to grips with the basics through a set of videos which fail to stimulate or give you any sense of the scale or excitement that you do eventually encounter.
Click for larger imageWe were fairly bored with the first hour or so of slow gameplay where we constructed mass extractors by clicking and dragging an icon onto mass deposit points highlighted on the map or ordered our Supreme Commander (CDR) to build a naval base while we sat around twiddling our thumbs waiting for the process to finish.
Click for larger imageWe took on the role of the Aeon faction, although you do have the choice of playing as any of the three factions. Our overall goal was to eradicate the threat from the two other factions, the Cybran and the UEF and after spending of an hour or so building attack boats, submarines and frigates and erecting an air factory, the only action we saw were a few enemy units descending on our position. We took out the enemy easily by clicking on our units and pointing them in the direction of the attack and then sat back, once again twiddling our thumbs, while our bombers took out the threat with ease.