Supreme Commander 2 PC Review
Played on:
Windows
Fans of Chris Taylor's games couldn't really believe it when Supreme Commander 2 was announced. The brilliant but much-maligned PC-only strategy game was getting a sequel? And it was being published by... Square Enix? It seemed like an April Fools joke, but it wasn't. Now that the sequel is in our hands, fans of the series are understandably a little upset on how SupCom2 isn't a vastly-expanded take on the first. But does that make it a bad game? Not at all.
The sequel continues the story of the three factions after an assassination splits them up and starts the war all over again. Sure, they teamed up to defeat the Seraphim, but peace didn't last long, and the UEF, the Cybrans, and the Aeon (now called just "The Illuminate") are back at it. You'll play characters in all three factions over the course of the game's campaign, and will eventually get access to every unit and ability in each of the three races' arsenals as you go.
Screw the Campaign
But anyone who knows a good Chris Taylor game well understands that the single player campaign is only there because it's a standard thing for strategy games nowadays. Even with a supposed focus on story with Squeenix's influence here, the campaign is full of horrible voice acting and limited choice in small, tight missions that often restrict too much. Nolan North (the voice of Nathan Drake in the Uncharted games) almost makes it worth the effort early on, but not even his great acting saves it. In the end, the campaign falls flat and does a poor job of getting you used to fighting against AIs in Skirmish mode or against real people online.
So let's move straight over to that, shall we? Even those who only play strategy games for the single player would do well to quickly move over to the Skirmish mode. Here, you'll quickly find that Supreme Commander 2 is not nearly as glorious or ambitious as its predecessor, but that scaling back also comes with one huge benefit: performance. Simply put, SupCom2 has smoother gameplay than the first one ever did, even after three years since the original game's release. Not only is the pathfinding generally better (other than when big experimental units are trying to move around in your base), but the whole thing just runs very smooth, often with even more special effects and physics effects going on at once. Hell, some missions even run well on systems as slow as the recent ION-based netbooks out there, and very few recent games run well on those. So if system requirements were your only barrier to playing, those should be pretty much gone by now.
You sure this is the sequel?
Of course, the unit cap is now 500 instead of 1000, although you'll find that with eight players in a game, the action is so fast and furious that it's tough to actually hit the cap. With nukes flying, experimentals flowing freely, and often hundreds of units clashing together all over a map, SupCom2 is not light on action. It's here that the game is true to Chris Taylor titles of the past, and this is where it really shines. You won't be micromanaging your units like Blizzard games ask you to or playing the rock-paper-scissors game that many RTS titles require, but instead you'll be throwing hordes of multifunction units (at least, that's how they are once upgraded) at the enemy in an attempt to overrun his base and take out his commander.
There have been some unpopular changes, though, the biggest of which was the drastic simplification of the economy. Gone is the "pay as you go" economy of using Mass and Energy only as it was needed, and what we have instead is a more standard RTS system of paying upfront for every unit you queue up. This gets a little awkward with the infinitely-repeating build queues you can create, and can often lead to factories automatically pausing their production until you come back and unpause them. It's true that you at least won't fall behind on your econ like you could in the first game, but teaching players how not to might have been the better idea rather than axing the whole system.
Tech levels are entirely gone, too, as now your units can be upgraded through a separate Tech Tree window. As you build Research structures you'll gain tech points faster and faster, and you can then spend them to upgrade units, your ACU, or your structures. You'll also unlock new units like gunships or shield generators, and eventually on to the powerful experimental units. One of the best parts of the tech system is that once you have the research points, they can never be taken away by a nuke or a throng of enemies breaking stuff in your base; the tech you research is always available to you, and it doesn't increase the cost of the units you pump out from your factories. What this means is that you've got some chance of recovery if your base is nuked, although you'll likely need help from a friend to get you back on your feet.
The removal of tech levels also means that the number of units in the game has been reduced. Now, any upgrades you achieve immediately switches your force over entirely. Gas Powered Games also tried to differentiate the races more with entirely different tech trees, unique abilities like the UEF's focus on artillery, the Illuminate's hovering land units (they have no navy at all), or the Cybran navy's ability to sprout legs (all of them, this time) and walk on land. This is a disappointment for some fans, especially those who like to make lists of everything that has been removed from the first game. And frankly, it's a very long list, although I think it's debatable whether most of the items on that list actually made it better.
But the action's definitely there
Experimental units can now be built much more freely and quickly than before, so much so to the point that many 20-minute games will often have multiple experimentals going at once. Some of them are much weaker than you may remember - the new Fatboy, Megalith, and Soul Ripper are all much more easily blown up compared to their SupCom1 counterparts - but they do offer fierce firepower much earlier in the game.
Maps have been reduced in size overall, but what you may find is that it's not really a big deal. Sure, it seems like the sequel is devolving from the original, but it means that you'll spend more time actually fighting your enemy than you will trying to ferry units up to the front lines. And the economy and tech changes also mean that base management is generally simpler, allowing you to spend more time working on the combat, developing your overall strategy and working with your friends.
Community disapproval
There have been a few balance issues that have popped up in the first week of competitive play. The UEF can turtle extremely well for one, as shield generators are very powerful when used in groups, and gunships often rule the early game to the point that many smaller games have players spamming air units rather than a mix of air and ground. And nukes are annoying because all players in a team game have to spend a ton of research points to build Nuke Defense buildings, but it only takes one guy on the opposite side to build a nuke silo and quickly start nuking any opposing base that has no defense. These balance issues can all be fixed with patches, and it's kind of expected in a strategy game as complex as this.
Unfortunately, SupCom2 got off to a bad start with a poor campaign-only demo along with the release of the highly-anticipated Starcraft II closed beta not two weeks before their own big launch date. It's likely that this will stunt the growth of the SupCom2 community, although we've found a decent number of active new players - this isn't just a subset of the first game's online fanbase, many of whom simply don't like the changes made in the sequel. At the same time, the integration with Steam seems to have come at a cost, as the online matchmaking is pretty barebones and there's no GPGNet features like the mod/map/replay Vault have been left behind entirely. And while GPGNet wasn't the most efficient or functional frontend, the ability to play with friends directly from my Steam friends list and get access to some achievements just isn't enough to me to make up for the loss of its functionality. Chris Taylor's gone on record saying that they'd like to add those features back in at some point, but I've gotten the vibe that that may only happen if SupCom2 sees some kind of runaway success - which isn't terribly likely.
What disappoints me is that there are tons of strategy games out there in the style of Blizzard's million-selling hits, and the economy changes, map size, and game length in SupCom2 puts it much closer to those games. While the guys at Gas Powered Games have still put together a solid and entertaining multiplayer game, it's not the Supreme Commander that the fanbase knows and loves. It's still fun and should wind up creating a community of its own, but I'm disappointed that GPG couldn't figure out how to keep the original hardcore fans happy while bringing in a new legion of players. Supreme Commander 2 is the best game GPG has released in the last couple of years, but for us fans of Chris Taylor's best releases, it's just not quite enough.
