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.
