Supreme Commander 2

Format PC

Developer Gas Powered Games

Publisher Square Enix

Genre Sim / Strategy

2 Comments

Good Lord, what have they done? Gas Powered Games, now working with Final Fantasy creators Square Enix, have turned the PC's most grandiose real-time strategy into something small and simple. But as the fanboy tears stream down my face and splash onto my N key - inadvertently selecting all my naval units - I am dimly aware of something else. I quite like it.

It's smaller and simpler, yes, but no one's replaced SupCom: the first game's still there, it still looks great and is still a megalomanic thrill to play. SupCom 2 isn't good in any of the ways the first one was: the scale isn't spectacular, the maps aren't lush or inviting, you don't have the power to plan out your whole base before it's built, and there isn't a huge menu of nerdily exciting deathbots to build.

Instead they've gone for the risky decision of making it playable. Did you play SupCom? It was hard to play. Even once I'd grasped the unconventional principles of the economy, it took me so long to figure out how to set up an efficient base that eventually I gave up, turned off Fog of War, and just watched how a top-level AI did it. That was a problem not just for the accessibility of SupCom, but also the fun of playing it competitively: the winner is the player who most robotically copies the optimal base build. There are plenty of interesting options once you're set up, but that doesn't matter if your opponent has enough resources to pick one before you do.

This game is almost laughably simple by comparison. Build a land factory (literally, a factory that makes land units) and you can construct a tank, or a longer range tank. You still have to capture Mass nodes and build power generators, but the game won't let you build anything you don't already have the resources for. That means no crashing your economy, so there's not much of a knack to setting up a base.

It does get more complicated from there, but all that complexity is built into the Research screen. It's a menu of technologies that unlock or upgrade units, divided into five separate trees: Land, Air, Naval, Structure and ACU (your commander unit). Each of the three factions have different trees: the UEF's Air technologies enable very early access to a powerful gunship, while the Cybran Land tree lets them be first on the field with a formidable Experimental Megabot. There are more basic differences, too: the Illuminate have no Naval tree at all, since all their land units can hover over water. And Cybran boats can be upgraded to sprout legs and become terrifying spidery land units for just three research points.

You progress up these trees slowly at first - you might have generated five Research points by the time your base is established, ten after your first scuffle. Even if you spend them all in one tree, the shortest route to a top-tier experimental unit is 23 points. To really specialise in Air, say, you'll be spending 35 points in that tree alone.

This means setting up your base involves some decision-making right away. Not just in terms of whether to plump for Land, Air, Structures or Sea, but whether you want to build Research Centres to race through the upgrade trees faster, or Power Generators to build up the energy reserves you'll need to build your first Experimental. I've been tinkering with a balance that produces enough energy to build a Soul Ripper Experimental Gunship shortly after I earn the final 13 points needed to unlock it, for maximum soul-ripping at the earliest possible time.

Once you've got that first mega-unit, it's not improbable that you've won. Games of SupCom 2 often last less than 15 minutes, and even the larger clashes only take about half an hour to resolve. If your opponent does survive, though, and their counter-attack doesn't destroy you, it starts to get interesting.

You're now generating Research points at a rate of knots, partly because you've got a lot of Research Centres and partly because killing things in combat produces them too. To stay competitive, you have to very quickly decide what else to complement your specialisation with, or whether to keep pumping points into the tree you've picked. If you've made the aforementioned Soul Ripper, for example, you might want to keep upgrading the aircraft you've made in the meantime. You can make them faster, tougher, even give them all personal shields, so that quick strikes incur no lasting damage.

Or you could invest in Land units, unlocking the basics like the Adapter: an awesome Cybran vehicle that shoots down aircraft, intercepts incoming tactical missiles and shields nearby ground units. Once you've got a decent land army, you can go back to the Air tree and unlock transport ships pretty quickly, thanks to your headstart there. Now you've got a tough backbone to your army - Land units are typically some of the strongest - with all the rapid mobility of your air force. More importantly, unlike in SupCom, your opponent doesn't. By a certain point in the first game, everyone had access to everything. Here, even once you've picked two or three specialities, you're likely to have access to some seriously powerful stuff that your opponent just can't produce yet.

I've been talking so far about Skirmish games against the AI, and multiplayer matches against humans. Supreme Commander 2 also has a story-driven campaign where you play each of the factions in turn. I haven't had a chance to get very far into it yet, but the early missions do nothing to sway my prejudice that this is just a terrible format for a Supreme Commander game. The mechanics of SupCom 2 are all about how opponents who start equal can best each other through smart decisions. Scripted story missions start you on unequal footings, so you don't know whether you won because of your strategy or the stack of the deck. And the story itself - revolving around fathers and sons, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters - feels as absurdly irrelevant to the robot wars on screen as it might in Chess 2: A Lover's Revenge.

If being the first to build an Experimental wins you the game this often in the final version, Supreme Commander 2 is going to be a mixed bag. If matches escalate to the point where both players see their ultimate weapons reach fruition, it'll be a wonderful explosion of fast-paced robot death. Either way, it's going to be a more easily playable but less remarkable game than Supreme Commander 1.

This article first appeared in the March issue of PC Gamer, available here with free postage. In the mag, it's accompanied by a two-page battle report about how a multiplayer match between Tom and Rich plays out. In short: surprisingly.

Tom Francis