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Crecente: Fresh turn on strategy

Published March 2, 2007 at midnight

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Supreme Commander might be flawed and lack head-turning innovation, but this PC title still offers enough tweaks to make the battle-worn, real-time strategy genre seem fresh.

Developer Gas Powered Games says it isn't a sequel to the popular Total Annihilation, but fans will certainly find a lot of similarities.

Supreme Commander, like its predecessor, still involves capturing, defending and mining Mass deposits in order to accrue enough of the substance to make new units. You also have to build generators to power your units and their creation.

But as with all real-time strategy games, the heart of Supreme Commander is about forming and commanding a growing military force in real-time and directing them across a map as you battle it out with player- or computer-controlled armies.

You can choose to command one of three factions, each one with a distinct look and featuring futuristic battle tanks, jet fighters, spaceships, attack bots and one armored command unit that's part engineer, part warrior and part general.

That final unit is key: Unlike with many computer strategy games, loss of this single unit spells instant defeat, lending an interesting twist to Supreme Commander.

While the giant robot command unit can be upgraded to house a variety of weapons and gadgets - from a teleporter to a tactical missile launcher - you still have to zealously watch over this unit when it wades into battle.

Destroying an enemy's command unit is also a dangerous proposition because they go nuclear, leveling everything around them in a blinding white flash of light and mushroom cloud.

The explosion is breathtaking, as are all the game's graphics. One of the title's biggest selling points is the ability to instantly zoom in to see an entire battle unfold, watching tanks roll up with armored robots and planes. The battle, when viewed this closely, is gritty. Planes take hits and then spiral into the ground, exploding in a blast of smoke and fire that ignites nearby trees and damages nearby units.

And if you want to watch the larger war unfold you can just as easily zoom out so far that your units become symbols crawling across a map seen from space.

Also, if you have two monitors you can use the second as a full screen scalable map - something quite helpful when fighting on multiple fronts.

My favorite aspect of Supreme Commander is how well it handles working with multiple commands. It's easy to tell one unit to go build a factory, then repair a unit, then build some wall, then reclaim destroyed units without having to follow it around, constantly issuing new orders.

And it's just as easy to command multiple squads of units from around the map to launch a coordinated attack on a single target.

Graphics and nuance might be what sells a game, but the game's strategic philosophy is what determines its staying power.

On a very basic level, most strategy games fall back on a classic rock-paper-scissors approach to strategy. Rock beats scissors. Scissors beat paper. Paper beats rock. Just change the names to suit the battlefield.

While that initially holds true with Supreme Commander, the rules quickly change as you advance through the game's multiple tech levels and upgrade your units.

By the time you hit the fourth, experimental level, you're able to create mammoth units that can completely tip the game in your favor.

The decision to have the different factions' units become more diverse as the game progresses leads to longer, more drawn-out battles that seem more open to creative thinking and more reflective of real-world strategy.

While Supreme Commander hits most of the important elements dead on, it falls short in some aspects. The single-player campaigns are unnecessarily limited, confusing and at times mired down with petty, seemingly pedantic goals.

The game's artificial intelligence, while generally quite good, could still go a little haywire in the thick of battle, with your units attacking anything in sight rather than just what they've been ordered to attack. And the multiplayer function suffers from occasional issues, including crashing in midwar. I'm sure an upcoming patch will fix that last issue.

Supreme Commander might initially come off as confounding, or, worse, no different than any other real-time strategy title, but any armchair strategist who gives it some time and a little effort will come to love it.

Supreme Commander

• Rating: Everyone 10 and over

• Platform: PC

• Grade: B-

• What we liked: Robust graphics, intriguing twiston basic game strategy, massive maps and battles.

• What we didn't like: Frustrating and limited single-player campaigns, occasionally wonky artificial intelligence, occasionally unstable online play.

The best strategy

Brian D. Crecente's three favorite real-time strategy games of all-time

• Company of Heroes: This World War II strategy game squeezes all of the nonessentials out of the increasingly bloated genre and leaves you with a smart, gritty title that puts the emphasis back on strategy.

• Warcraft III: One of the granddaddies of highly stylized strategy games, Warcraft III brings lush graphics to the forefront and adds heroes to the mix.

• Age of Empires II: Age of Empires has you building an empire through key periods of history from the fall of Rome through the Middle Ages. There's nothing like running roughshod over a cluster of spear-toting footsoldiers with an army packing black-powder guns.