Now Playing: Supreme Commander

Supreme Commander is a sci-fi RTS game set during the ‘Infinite War’. There are three single player campaigns, one for each of the three competing factions – the UEF (typical Earth military) the Cybran Nation (uh, cyborgs) and the Aeon Illuminate (technologically advanced cultists). There’s also a multiplayer mode and the usual customisable skirmish options.

The three campaigns are all entirely separate, so you can play them in any order, and each starts you out small so you can slowly learn the new units of each faction throughout their individual campaigns. The overall story of each campaign is fine and keeps things ticking over, and the trash talking Commanders inject a little personality into what is otherwise a rather flat affair.

Given the differences between the three factions, you’d think there would a somewhat distinct play style for each, but sadly, this isn’t really the case, and each faction plays largely the same. I suppose in the interest of gameplay balance this makes sense, but unfortunately it’s not great for variety.

The UEF campaign is a little dull, as is its unit roster, largely moving from light tank, to medium tank to heavy tank and so on for pretty much every unit type. There are three different technology levels to advance through in order to unlock new units. Air, land and sea, stealth, heavy, light/scout, bombers, fighters, artillery etc. The Cybran and Aeon unit rosters follow a similar progression and serve the same functions, but are at least a little more interesting and exotic in design, and as a result I found their campaigns much more fun to play.

My biggest issue with the game is that I felt it lacked any kind of personality, particularly for the units. I think this is due to two issues. One is simply that the units are all automated robots, so there’s no human element at stake. Unlike other RTS games, there’s no memorable unit VA which so often instils a sense of fondness towards the units under a player’s control. The other issue is the scale of the game. You’ll be churning these units out by the hundred, and you’ll lose them by the hundreds too. As a result, you very quickly stop caring about them as individual units.

Because with such massive unit counts, individual units lose importance. Now, obviously this was intended by design, and the scale is certainly great, but the result is something of a disconnect between the player and their forces. This, for me, is what has made so many other RTS games enjoyable and more importantly memorable down the years – whether it be from unit design or as is usually the case, by their VA responses. In Supreme Commander, every unit is simply silent as you issue orders to hundreds of them at a time and they just feel completely expendable and forgettable.

Playing SC for the first time though was certainly an interesting experience. I did what I usually do in an RTS – I spent hours constructing a perfect, symmetrical, heavily defended base, before pumping out a large combined unit type force to smash the enemy. I then sent them into battle and within thirty seconds they were completely obliterated. What, thirty units not enough? I doubled it, and won – barely. And that’s the first lesson you learn in SC – this is a game about scale. Forget the typical RTS size – SC deals with hundreds of units – land, air and sea engaging in massive battles.

This really is the game’s big draw. You really feel like you’re engaging in truly massive scale battles, with hundreds of land, sea and air units all moving and fighting across the map at once. With a decent UI it’s fairly easy to keep track of and manage it all, and it certainly looks impressive. In terms of its technical proficiency and gameplay mechanics, I really can’t fault it.

So, overall, Supreme Commander is a solid, enjoyable RTS, and you really can’t go wrong with it if that’s what you want. It looks good and it plays fine. The big problem for me though, was just that the game never really gave me a reason to care. With such a grand scale, SC loses the personal touch that makes other RTS titles so much more memorable. I never really engaged with it, and as a result I never really cared much about my units, my missions or the overall campaign. But still, it’s certainly worth checking out if you’re a fan of the genre.

7/10