Review: Supreme Commander

Strategy gamers have had it pretty good over the past few months. They’ve enjoyed one of the best ever World War II strategy games (Company of Heroes) and one of the best ever historical strategy games (Medieval II: Total War).

And now the lucky blighters have got one of the best ever science fiction strategy games to sink their teeth into.

Supreme Commander’s creator, Gas Powered Games’ Chris Taylor, has long promised us real-time strategy (RTS) on a massive scale, and the finished product appears to deliver on this front.

Either played alone, with others online or over a Lan, Supreme Commander offers epic battles between thousands of land, sea and air units across vast maps that literally take you from one end of the galaxy to the other.

There’s a surprisingly convoluted back story involving bio-mechanical brain transplants, misplaced religious fundamentalism and imperialistic space colonisation, but it’s all basically an excuse for three distinct factions to enjoy a big old inter-galactic scrap.

In fact, Supreme Commander’s revelation is not that it does anything particularly new, but that it streamlines the whole RTS experience and makes it lots more fun. Resource-gathering tasks, for example, can be queued up so that you can concentrate on something more interesting.

Advancing through the technology tree, too, becomes less of a chore and more of a thrill – particularly when your eventual prize is a range of colossal experimental combat units.

On a technical level, Supreme Commander doesn’t look massively different to other titles of its type. Graphics are pretty good and stand up fairly well when zoomed right up close. It’s only when you zoom back out again, however, that it starts to become clear what sets this game apart from the rest – its size.

DirectX 10 support (via an update to be released in March) and the ability to use two monitors are really just the icing on an already very tasty, very large cake.