Kombo’s Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don’t waste your time. This is why we’ve split our reviews into four sections: What the Game’s About, What’s Hot, What’s Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.
What the Game’s About
Supreme Commander is a real time strategy (RTS) game for the Xbox 360. With PC roots, it hopes to achieve some success like EA has done with the RTS genre making it possible to have an enjoyable experience without a mouse and keyboard. Taking cues from the Command and Conquer series and StarCraft, Supreme Commander takes lessons learned from both wildly popular franchises and tosses them into its own blend of Sci-Fi. The complex narrative of three factions who are in an infinite war shows just how tricky it can be when trying to see what side is the most right out of them all.
What’s Hot
The scope of what Supreme Commander achieves is something that will impress you right from the press of the start button. Taking a PC RTS and “shrinking” it down to fit a console was not in the vocabulary of the developers. All the units, upgrades and issuing of commands are at you fingertips. Each of the three different factions have their own unique look and feel. The units are named the same across the board but with faction specific traits to help edge an advantage in tight situations.
Nuances with the units leads to an endless number of strategies. Battles can last for hours as you plan and plot your next moves. Building up an army and fortifying your base progresses at a nice clip, neither too fast nor too slow. The technology progression (tech tree) is as nuanced as the units. There are three tiers to build building and with every successive upgrade you are rewarded with more powerful units at a more resource intensive price.
The campaign mode should last you quite a long time and when you find yourself at the end, you can either beat the game with the other factions or take your battles online over Xbox Live, host LAN games or select from a range of AI traits to play against giving the game a great deal of replayability for armchair generals.
What’s Not
What is Supreme Commander’s biggest asset is also its biggest flaw, the scope. The game was ambitious to pull off and it didn’t quite achieve the lofty goal of taking a PC game and be uncompromising. The maps are far too large for quick navigation on the controller. Zooming in and out makes trying to coordinate multiple fronts a largely challenging task even with controller shortcuts. The shortcuts are even buried under a few modifier buttons to make issuing commands a process of trial and error.
Supreme Commander falls short of being a good game because of one problem that trumps the issue with the controller: technical problems. During our time spent with the game, there were times where the game would come down with a bout of slowdown. It was curious that it even happened at all because the graphics are nothing to write home about, tiny (some units are downright hard to see) and blurry. There was even one occasion that the game froze up during the tutorial.
Final Word
Kudos to the developers for trying to tackle so much material in one DVD, as a result, there is a ton of content that RTS fans will revel in. Taking the PC game and bringing it to the 360, there should have been some editorial choices made about what would translate well onto consoles. Unfortunately, design cuts were not made and porting issues were left in tact which left Supreme Commander for the 360 a case study that PC and console are still two very different platforms.
