Supreme Commander 2 initial review
March 05, 2010
Ok, so I've played three skirmish games of Supreme Commander 2 now, and I'm going to post my initial impressions. The first game was against a normal AI, and the second and third both against a normal and a hard teamed up against me.
For starters, the game's definitely a lot more action-oriented. Like it's just really in your face. Everything builds a lot quicker, and there's no tech 1, tech 2 and tech 3 stuff. You research stuff now, and you gain research points by either building research buildings or with combat. You have different categories, like air, navy, land, structures, etc... and you spend the points to unlock things like bonuses and new units.
Yeah, forget almost everything you know about the series, either from Supreme Commander or even Total Annihilation that came so many years ago. The book has been re-written, somewhat substantially. Whether or not you like that, is up to you; I'm not necessarily saying it's good or bad.
You don't have to build mass and power storage now either, what you acquire is yours to keep. This comes with a catch; you have to have the resources now to build anything. It's very much like Command and Conquer now in that respect, and if you don't have the resources available to build that super unit, you won't be able to begin construction until you do.
The new way of doing things makes a big change to how you would use the shift key to queue up commands. If you queue up an engineer to build three anti-air turrets, for example, but you only have enough current resources for two, he's only going to build two, because all the resources for all queued structures are taken straight away. This is something I'd prefer they changed.
Come to think of it, the game is littered with technical issues like this. If you have one engineer assist another, it will only assist with the first structure in a queue, then it goes idle. You can't have engineers assist buildings like factories until after they're built too. Speaking of factories, you can put them on repeat, and they'll auto-pause if you run out of resources, but they won't auto-resume if you have enough resources once again.
These may be minor-sounding issues, but they're serving to make the gameplay a lot more frustrating than it needs to be. There's a lot more micromanagement that's needing to be done now, which feels like one fuck of a giant leap backwards.
I do like the game, don't get me wrong, but I don't know if I like it more than the original. That's not to say that I don't, mind you.
The jury's still out, but if they can fix the sort of issues that I've brought up, that might just win the case for them. I'm not hopeful though, Gas Powered Games make decent enough games, but they're not known for their post-release support. Cross fingers.
Oh yeah, and here's a video demonstrating how the first skirmish game ended:
For starters, the game's definitely a lot more action-oriented. Like it's just really in your face. Everything builds a lot quicker, and there's no tech 1, tech 2 and tech 3 stuff. You research stuff now, and you gain research points by either building research buildings or with combat. You have different categories, like air, navy, land, structures, etc... and you spend the points to unlock things like bonuses and new units.
Yeah, forget almost everything you know about the series, either from Supreme Commander or even Total Annihilation that came so many years ago. The book has been re-written, somewhat substantially. Whether or not you like that, is up to you; I'm not necessarily saying it's good or bad.
You don't have to build mass and power storage now either, what you acquire is yours to keep. This comes with a catch; you have to have the resources now to build anything. It's very much like Command and Conquer now in that respect, and if you don't have the resources available to build that super unit, you won't be able to begin construction until you do.
The new way of doing things makes a big change to how you would use the shift key to queue up commands. If you queue up an engineer to build three anti-air turrets, for example, but you only have enough current resources for two, he's only going to build two, because all the resources for all queued structures are taken straight away. This is something I'd prefer they changed.
Come to think of it, the game is littered with technical issues like this. If you have one engineer assist another, it will only assist with the first structure in a queue, then it goes idle. You can't have engineers assist buildings like factories until after they're built too. Speaking of factories, you can put them on repeat, and they'll auto-pause if you run out of resources, but they won't auto-resume if you have enough resources once again.
These may be minor-sounding issues, but they're serving to make the gameplay a lot more frustrating than it needs to be. There's a lot more micromanagement that's needing to be done now, which feels like one fuck of a giant leap backwards.
I do like the game, don't get me wrong, but I don't know if I like it more than the original. That's not to say that I don't, mind you.
The jury's still out, but if they can fix the sort of issues that I've brought up, that might just win the case for them. I'm not hopeful though, Gas Powered Games make decent enough games, but they're not known for their post-release support. Cross fingers.
Oh yeah, and here's a video demonstrating how the first skirmish game ended: