Supreme Commander 2 Preview

After playing the Just Cause 2 demo endlessly for the past while after it came out, they recently released another demo onto the marketplace. The sequel to the 2007 RTS hit Supreme Commander. And surprisingly, just like Just Cause 2, it is published by Square Enix. Because I had started playing StarCraft again recently, this new demo sparked my interest. After playing it for a bit, I was somewhat satisfied, but never having played the first one and that combined with the seemingly pointless tutorial that didn't really teach me anything kind of turned me off to this sequel. But that being said, it did have it's interesting moments as well.


The main feature that sets this game apart from others in the genre, is the scale of the battles you get to control. After the first few tutorials, this was definately apparent having gotten to take control of over 100 units at the same time in multiple places on the battlefield. But even with that amount, that was a relatively insignificant amount of troops compared to the amount you can actually build up to. Commanding them is pretty much a breeze as well, but the one thing I must say is that while it is still console friendly, it is a bit more complex to use than Ensemble's Halo Wars. So in one respect it is more complex, providing better tactical options which would appeal to the hardcore RTS player but, if you are like me and aren't too terribly good at it, can easily get turned off by the learning curve. But damn if it isn't cool to see hundreds of units battle it out at once!

Besides the massive scale at which you can play, I didn't see many other things that made it stand out from your typical RTS game. I mean, once you have played one, you have pretty much played them all. This is no exception. You gather resources, you built oddly complex looking buildings, and you make gratuitous amounts of units to complete the small myriad of objectives. And of course, the demo level was pretty much summed up into 'kill everything' so go figure.

What bugged me about the demo though, is how unprepared I felt after having done the tutorial. I knew how to make units, I knew how to attack and build.. but it never really told me unit types or what they even do. My objective was to take over certain points on islands at sea, having told me to make a certain unit and so I did.. but the unit couldn't actually do anything. Thanks, now I have wasted resources and looked like an idiot. I had to McGuyver the situation and used some other unit that seemed to get the job done. Maybe this certain mission would have made sense if I had been playing more and wasn't just thrusted into it like I was, but I don't think this mission was the right choice for the demo. There were definitely better choices, at least.

So from what I see this game has the potential to have some really neat battles on a scale we have never seen before, but what you see is something we have seen done a lot. (Not that that is a bad thing in itself really.) If you are itching to play a new RTS and don't want it to be too risqué in it's gameplay, then Supreme Commander 2 is the game for you.