Supreme Commander gets a great review (natch)
Supreme Commander got a stellar 9 out of 10 review from Games Radar. The review is really worth a read, even if you’re not too much into gaming. At least you’ll see where the future of gaming is headed before everyone is doing it. Basically the review spends six pages raving about how awesome the game is (it really is) and only one page discussing some downsides.
I’ve already addressed all of the upsides in my previous posts on Supreme Commander, so I’ll just briefly re-consider the downsides that the review mentions. For one, they point out that the game is hardware-intensive. Yes, it certainly is. I hadn’t bought a new computer for three years and only just bought a new one right before Supreme Commander came out (not a coincidence), and even with top-of-the-line hardware, there can be significant chugging at times. What’s really scary is that the chugging seems to be due to processor limitations rather than graphics limitations, even though I’m using a very nice Core 2 Duo processor.
Simply put, the game is very ambitious. Like Total Annihilation, it will take a couple years after release before the hardware finally catches up with the software that Chris Taylor has graced us with. It’s not that that the game is unplayable; it most certainly is playable, and on small maps, it runs beautifully. But the ultimate promise of this game is playing on behemoth battlefields that are 80km on a side. Even the best hardware on the market right now can’t handle that without a degradation in gameplay performance.
The review also finds fault with Supreme Commander’s landscapes. They say they’re too sparse and they don’t really give a sense of scale. I disagree. I don’t know what they expected the landscapes to look like, but Supreme Commander is pretty dead on. I guess they wanted all of the worlds to be crammed full of various things — but that’s not particularly realistic. Having looked at lots of satellite photography, I can say that, although Supreme Commander maybe doesn’t have the most outlandish or interesting scenery, it is accurate, and it is what you’d expect to see when looking at scenery from so high up. Maybe the people at Games Radar were thrown off by the huge scale and didn’t realize that all of the environmental decorations they thought were missing are just so small that they disappear completely at all but the most zoomed-in levels. The Supreme Commander, for instance, which is the first unit you get on every level, is somewhere between 100 and 200 feet tall judging by the opening campaign sequence. So the base unit scale is already quite large, and when you zoom out to tactical and even strategic scales, what exactly are you expecting to see? You’re looking at dozens of square kilometers at once! You’d just expect to see the shape of the land, which is exactly what you do see in Supreme Commander. Individual trees aren’t visible at those levels, although you can see the green of vast forests.
So, the sense of scale really is there, it’s just that the Games Radar people didn’t realize how incredibly large the scale actually is, so they confused it with a lack of a sense of scale (something that can also happen when you’re, say, flying in an airplane).
Anyway, the short summary is that Supreme Commander is awesome. Buy it. You won’t regret it.
