Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Been there, done that"

I think a good part of any game should be drama. Strategy games in particular tend to depict epic struggles for survival where carnage, death and destruction are followed by glorious victory. Surprisingly in Supreme Commander such drama is totally absent. It is set in a future where people can use jump gates to send a single person (that is you, in a big mech suit) to the far reaches of the galaxy. A single person mind you, and not a whole army. The consequence of this is that the confrontations you have are somewhat bizarre "wars" between what are actually no more than 3-4 sentient beings. Each "commander" creates an army of robots to fight for him. It all feels like big boys with toys playing with planets for sand boxes. All that to kill one guy in a big suit.

It doesn't help that what story there is is distributed over just 6 missions, each of which takes far too long to come to a conclusion. There are three factions to choose from but it seems they're simply retelling the exact same story, if only from a different perspective. Since the units are almost identical in all but appearance there is very little reason to play the campaign of any of the other two factions.

Now it's not all bad; if you look past the story and just get to the fighting it's quite ok. Units are balanced so that they are strong vs. one type and weak vs. other types of units, meaning you will have to use mixed unit strategies to get anywhere. Once the fight gets underway it gets so hectic that you'll stay glued to you seat just to fend off the next attack. The interface in particular is outstanding. You can queue all kinds of commands to units; you can string a bunch of commands together so you don't have to constantly babysit particular units. You can easily move to a different place on the map by zooming all the way out and back in where you point the mouse.

Perhaps multiplayer is how this game really should be played, but I haven't so I can't say anything about that. As a single player game, I think there are certainly better games you can buy.