Superpower 2 is a revolutionary new concept, but its flaws overshadow the games concept.
The original game had its good points, but it was more bad than it was good. It lacked a solid combat system. The economic model was horribly written, and the interface was choppy and at times unstable. Possibly one of the best features was a built in MP3 player, allowing players to jam to their own tunes as they conquered about.
Superpower 2 attempted to capitalize on the suggestions of the fans by implementing a more solid economic model. The ability to interact on a digitally rendered 3D globe, and a slightly more graphical combat system. Unfortunately, just like the previous game, several major flaws held the game back.
The genre is very appealing to the type that are interested in geopolitical drama. Nations undermining nations in order to secure a future for themselves in the place of the world. Each nation has its own unique setup, that of the state of the Nation in 2001 (data gathered from the US Census and CIA World Factbook) So, the USA would be a Military and Economic Superpower, while other smaller nations like the Congo suffer from Civil Unrest and a poor economy. This makes the game challenging, and rather interesting when a player manages to take Sri Lanka and turn it into a Superpower, but as a whole, the economy limits the player's productiveness. The horrible glitches that allow over 200% taxation make the game unrealistic and unbalanced. With a Population of 1 Billion China can easily overtax them 200% and not have any penalties by simple closing their borders. People are then forced to pay outrageous amounts to the government and China thus walks away with the game.
Another part of the game that is lacking is the combat system. Instead of the small blocks that represent units in the first game, there is now a generic picture for each type of unit on a battlefield rendered in the style of the region being fought. Replacing the specialized attack orders of each unit are now orders for entire types of units to engage in certain actions. This is rather boring to watch as smoke appears over each unit after an attack and the numbers slowly dwindle down to nothing, hailing the victor in a news message shortly after. More players find it encouraging to just nuke their enemy to death, with the overabundance of force it quickly trashes the game and makes it unplayable. Nukes are also severely downsized in power. Sure they destroy armies, and they can lower the population of a city, and destroy the economy. But in a whole the death toll is no where near realistic. If a Single Nuke hits Beijing it may only kill 700,000 people, and Beijing is a city of Millions.
This type of unrealism coupled with the flaws of the game including numbers not adding up, the AI nations not doing much more than adjusting their economy and closing their borders every few years doesnt allow for much interesting play time with the PC. Sure its fun to stomp around the world with the USA's High tech army, but when the AI never builds any new units after you release their nation from your control is pretty unrealistic. Other things such as China randomly nuking Zimbabwe also pop up all the time and ruin the stability of the world. The randomness is pretty downright unsettling and doesnt lead for a good game experience at all.
Although the game does have a slightly better Multiplayer feature. If you can get past all of the troubles connecting to a host, avoiding random people that enter the game, select a Nuclear nation and then proceed to nuke people at random, there can be some rather interesting diplomatic situations, but the problems in the Singleplayer games present itself. The AI doesnt build up after wars, and there is nothing other than a hosts discretion that can limit Taxation. That or wasting 3 hours building up a nation and preparing to make your big move just to see the host claim its time for dinner and shut down the server.
So while Superpower 2 has the ability to blow up and become a new type of game that will appeal to both political types and the average shoot em up' blow em' up gamer, it lacks the solid fundamentals that a game needs to succeed in todays market. Even with the patches that were released, many bugs still flood the game and with no more official support from the developer due to a developer/publisher dispute, it isn't likely to see anything big come from the series in a very long time.