Supreme Commander (Xbox 360)
When you review a console port of a computer real-time strategy game, you have two paths. You can compare it to other RTSes on the console front: If you want to buy a real-time strategy game for your Xbox 360, how does this particular game hold up against the available options? The alternative is to compare the port to the PC version: Does the game give you the same options and abilities and does it introduce new material?
alt="Battle Image 1" />The latter option is never good to the console game, and Supreme Commander is no different. One of 2007's biggest real-time titles, Supreme Commander is full of giant robots, big explosions and the largest armies you'll ever see fielded in an RTS. The PC original's big innovation was the satellite view of the field, allowing you to control all the units from God's point of view. All the robots became NATO symbols, and you could manage the war without ever looking at the fancy artwork. And because the RTS is a beast native to the PC, it is nearly impossible for a console carbon copy to improve on the original.
The campaign? The same three sides playing the same missions that PC players played. The maps? Not a lot of difference from one version to the next. The tutorial? Identical except for the instructions on how to control your units. So if you want to play the best version of Supreme Commander, there is really nothing pushing you to the 360. Supreme Commander is unquestionably better on the PC.
alt="Air Attack" />Part of it is a matter of scale. Supreme Commander is the grandest of the grand; the developers take the word "supreme" seriously. Campaign scenario maps start in a tiny spot, and then expand and expand until you realize that it will take two hours to finish this mission, even if you do everything right. So you spend most of the game controlling the war from the satellite view. This is not so easy when you are sitting on a couch seven feet from your TV screen. One faction's default colors are black on blue, so artillery and tanks tend to look the same. And may the Lord have mercy on you if you have SDTV. The icons become nearly indistinguishable from each other, so quickly grabbing your assault bots is out of the question.
And, since this is the only scale at which much of the game is manageable, you will spend a lot of time with the suboptimal group selection. Drag-select is likely to grab a whole lot of stuff you may not want to send into battle, so you will often have to think hard about your factory rally points and grouping -- harder than you normally would, since the game isn't any slower.
alt="Transports" />Loading transports is one thing, setting a ferry schedule is another.
As a console RTS, Supreme Commander is a step forward. Gas Powered Games has worked hard on translating the elegant mouse/hotkey interface to the more cumbersome 360 controller and have almost cracked the nut. You can choose from a number of radial menus with the d-pad, using the sticks to choose what you would like to do within those menus. They get around precision mousing by letting you be "close enough" to a mass resource or hydrocarbon spot to build on it, and it automatically cycles through available mass locations so you can queue them more easily. When you are building power plants, the game will arrange them for you, and you just keep pressing that button until you are done. It's not especially intuitive at first, but once you get into the rhythm, it works surprisingly well most of the time.
But when it doesn't work, it really doesn't work. One problem with radial menus that have a dozen options is that, when you are in a hurry, a slip of the thumb can cost you valuable time. I was seriously stalled in one mission because I was too slow to realize I had queued up four aircraft factories when I wanted four mass extractors. The air transport mechanic is fussier here than in the PC version, even though airlifts are central to quick victories on many maps.
alt="Battle Image 2" />The artificial intelligence is very weak, too. You can probably excuse the "easy" computer opponent for not putting up any challenge whatsoever, but on "medium" you will face swarms of level 1 mechs long after you've upgraded to level 2 tanks and bombers, and your opponent won't do much to defend its resource collectors. The AI is skittish about using air power in any capacity, except on the highest difficulty levels, and beating the computer here is more a matter of mastering the controller than of fine-tuning your energy/mass matrix. And good luck if you want to find a quick multiplayer game. The lobbies aren't exactly swarming with warm bodies. Only the campaign provides any real sense of urgency or challenge.
A lot of the issues can be traced to Supreme Commander being too faithful a translation of the PC game. Just as novels moved to film must change their focus in order to work in the new medium, the first great console RTS will have to have the demands of the console environment foremost in mind. Like Dr. Johnson's dog, it would be easy to be astonished that Supreme Commander works at all on the 360, considering what a sophisticated and nuanced strategy game it is. But I am not certain that it works particularly well.
The 360 version of Supreme Commander is, in the final analysis, a good game that is constrained by the new platform. There is a glimmer of hope for the future in the way that Gas Powered Games has adapted the controller to standard RTS mechanics, but the game is just too large and asks too much of the gamer. Switching between tech tiers, upgrading resource collectors, co-coordinating strikes along multiple fronts ? more than any other RTS, Supreme Commander is a big-picture juggling act that approximates real war planning better than most other games in the genre. And your television just can't handle that.
This review was based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.
