Supreme Commander 2

We’ve just squandered the lives of literally hundreds of troops, desperately trying to destroy an Illuminate base and its absolutely huge Universal Colossus experimental unit before they can launch another nuke. The powerful Colossus refuses to go down, despite a seething hail of laser, artillery and cannon fire, protected by the base’s shield generator and anti-air turrets – costing us countless units. This fight has raged close to an hour, and we’ve repulsed wave after wave of enemies to gather resources and build our own devastating units, throwing them into the grinding, fiery maelstrom. This is all taking far longer than it should but, tasting victory and lost in the heart of battle, we don’t care. Supreme Commander 2 is prodding our brain’s RTS centre hard – and we’re loving it.

While we’ve always played every genre under the sun on PC, a part of us affectionately thinks of it as ‘our real-time strategy machine’. Since the halcyon days of Dune II it’s been one of our favourite genres, and while consoles have borrowed concepts like the FPS and RPG successfully from PC, you’d be hard pressed to point out a really successful console RTS. Frankly, it’s a niche genre (albeit a big one) – which is just the kind PC is so good at supporting. That said, developers are in this for the money, and some people believe that to be successful the RTS needs to be more accessible. A recent trend, exemplified by games like Company Of Heroes and DOW II, has seen a shift from large-scale combat and bases, adding more squad level and RPG mechanics.

Even genre stalwart C&C is adding RPG mechanics and losing base building to chase more casual fans. There’s nothing wrong with that, but just how the genre is going to evolve in an ‘accessibility’ driven market isn’t entirely clear yet – surely there’s still a place for the old-school traditional base-focused RTS? Happily for RTS fans, Gas Powered Games is proving to be keeper of that flame with Supreme Commander 2.

By taking the hardcore RTS mechanics of Supreme Commander (spiritual successor to Chris Taylor’s RTS classic Total Annihilation), refining them and combining them with a more accessible upgrade system lifted out of recent hit Demigod, Gas Powered Games has created a fantastic RTS that will appeal to a wider audience without alienating more traditional fans of the genre.

Just like any good RTS, Supreme Commander 2 (SC2) revolves around the three asymmetrical factions driving its battles, continuing the sci-fi story of the warring human colonies from Supreme Commander. The military UEF (United Earth Federation), computer human-hybrid Cybran nation and religion-based Illuminate factions return 25 years after Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. As their fragile alliance – formed to defeat the alien Seraphim in Forged Alliance – starts to crack, violence and war within factions and against each other soon erupts.

The three story campaigns are comprised of eighteen missions, telling the tale from the point of view of Commanders in the UEF, Illuminate and Cybran nation respectively. Gas Powered Games has attempted some interesting ideas narratively, but we were far more taken by its evolved take on the genre.
As with the first game, you control a titular ‘Supreme Commander’ – a giant robot able to construct base structures called an ACU (Armoured Command Unit). But it’s more than just a builder, it’s a powerful battlefield machine that can destroy smaller units easily and upgrades with a wide variety of abilities.

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