Supreme Commander review (Xbox 360)

Testing games isn’t as fun as it sounds, not that I’ve ever done it before - from what I’ve heard though, there’s little enjoyment to be had in the process.

Rather than relaxing on a comfy sofa, beer in one hand, and leisurely playing your way through the latest Grand Theft Auto, you’re instead expected to batter whatever half-finished rubbish publishers throw your way.

No, you’re not meant to enjoy the game, you’re meant to beat the hell out of it. Expose every glitch, fault, bug and any other crap that shouldn’t be there.

Not that the people responsible for Supreme Commander would know anything about play testing. Very rarely does a game this broken make it onto the market. From the stuttering intro FMV to the orchestration of grandiose battles between two forever-warring factions; nothing in Supreme Commander seems to work properly.

Which is a shame, really, because under all the surface bugs and annoyances, it’s actually a remarkably intricate real-time strategy, as we know from the PC version.

It just seems downright bonkers that Microsoft gave the thumbs-up to releasing this when most gamers will have chewed their own knees off in unabated frustration by the end of the tutorial level.

Released for Windows early last year, Supreme Commander is your typical sci-fi yarn, with the narrative involving three warring factions: the United Earth Federation, the Cybran Nation and Aeon Illuminate.

The conflict between the groups arises after the artificial intelligence-based Cybran Nation break away from their human masters, demanding independence.

The story develops as the campaign plays out and in time you fight as all three alliances. During gameplay, interaction between the three groups is portrayed by the odd clip of each chief commander appearing on screen babbling threats in your ear.

One of Supreme Commander’s most impressive features is the huge scale of the maps. Often starting out as allotment-sized green spaces, each one eventually expands into the horizon as the fighting hots up. At the beginning of each battle, you will have control of an ACU; a giant mech with capabilities in both construction and warfare.

From here on in you’ll develop power generators to source the natural resources of the land, factories to produce troops and weapons, and a variety of other structures necessary for sustained warfare.

Organising and directing your troops using the Xbox 360 controller is surprisingly painless, with the developers having successfully scaled down the original keyboard-controls into a system which allows you to select tools and arms to build with the D-Pad, and issues orders with the A and B buttons.

Another impressive feature is the ability to zoom right into the thick of the action with the second analogue stick, providing you with close-ups of each and every skirmish.

Despite this, you’ll most likely spend most of the game with the camera panned out as its longest range, which might give the game the appearance of a twenty-year old Spectrum title, but allows you to keep an eye on everything happening around the expansive battlefields.

Graphically, the game is a letdown. As mentioned, the ability to zoom on in to the heat of a battle is novel, but close up the troops and artillery appear as though they’ve been squeezed through a laminating machine.

This makes it all the more baffling as to why every action – from ordering 50 light tank units to charge an enemy base, to simply pressing the pause button – causes Supreme Commander to convulse with technical difficulties and grind to a halt.

So frequent are the issues, it’s not uncommon to experience at least a couple of lock-ups and crashes per mission.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to try out the game’s bundled online multiplayer mode, but judging from the rest of Supreme Commander, I can only imagine that Xbox Live battles aren’t won or lost judged on the number of casualties, but rather on whose copy of the game drops offline first.

Supreme Commander could have been a real-time strategy experience to rival Red Alert at its most awesome. What makes the technical issues all the more embarrassing is that this adaptation has arrived more than 18 months after the initial Windows release, so you can't help but wonder - "What the hell have the developers been doing?"

All in all, instead of seizing the real-time strategy genre by storm, Supreme Commander takes one step out of the trenches and trips over its shoelaces.

5/10

Daniel Shane