In the late 90’s, amidst the near fanatical worship of all things Blizzard, an endless flood of real-time strategy clones, and mediocrity, a strangely named developer named Cave Dog released a real-time strategy game that managed to energize the genre. The game was Total Annihilation, and it did a lot more than just throw a 3D coat over uninspired 2D gameplay. To many a strategy lover, Total Annihilation still ranks among the greatest real-time strategy games ever made. Finally, fans can begin the destruction anew.

Supreme Annihilation

Supreme Commander is not a sequel to Total Annihilation, but evolves all the great elements of the earlier game. As you may remember, Total Annihilation focused on two equally matched factions of robots destroying each other with truly massive armies. Now, Supreme Commander adds a much deeper layer of tactics and strategy to the carnage. Admittedly, the focus is definitely still on the total annihilation of your enemies.

While 3D landscapes are commonplace now, Total Annihilation introduced elevation and terrain as vital parts of strategic gameplay. Likewise, Supreme Commander takes almost everything you’ve seen in real-time strategy games over the last decade and makes it better, with matching upgrades in hardware requirements. Gas Powered Games designed Supreme Commander around dual core processors and, for those few lucky gamers, dual monitor set-ups. As a result, the game is an incredible hardware hog, making playing on lesser machines simply painful.

Everything about the presentation of Supreme Commander is technically amazing. The graphics are grand, detailed, and gorgeous; the battles are monumental and exciting; and, unlike Total Annihilation, even the storyline is engaging. As humans expanded out into the galaxy, they created a race of enslaved clones called the Cybrans to aid in their conquest of space, while another group of humans discovered a race of peaceful, enlightened aliens who follow a religion called The Way. Unfortunately, humanity xenophobically annihilated the aliens and the Cybrans rebelled, creating three warring factions. Thus starting the Infinite war.

Infinite Firepower

The war has raged for a thousand years, and the end is near as each side readies its own endgame scenario. Choosing either the United Earth Federation, the Aeon Illumanite, or the Cybran Nation, you’ll take control over an incredible war machine. Admittedly, each side actually isn’t that different in terms of individual units.  You take the role of the supreme commander—a giant, heavily armed robot capable of creating new units and structures, gathering resources, and going nuclear when worst comes to worst. During missions, the story moves along briskly as you receive communiqués from both your fellow officers and the enemy.

Supreme Commander isn’t a game of small skirmishes and intimate objectives. Instead, the game is, in every sense of the word, a vast game. Missions start out with only a small portion of the map visible, tossing smaller objectives at you to begin with, but as you complete your tasks, the map just keeps growing in size. As the real estate increases, so does your game. The saga of three opposing factions is epic, and battles are fought on a colossal scale. As the missions progress, the maps become flooded with hundreds of units, often from all three factions. Better yet, each faction has their own objective, so you can move around one side while actively working against another.

Supreme Commander takes the standard rock-papers-scissors strategy approach that real time strategy games have used since day one and turns it into a science. The result is a game that rewards exacting tactics and razor-sharp strategy players, but is bound to make anyone else want to go nuclear—even in the opening missions. Supreme Commander focuses on the refinement of real-time strategy gameplay to the exclusion of casual gamers. The basic gameplay is easy to pick up, thankfully, and the interface is intuitive, with a special multiplayer matching and chatting service enabling skilled players to jump right into the intense online action. Unfortunately, even on the easiest level, the game is punishingly hard on novice players. If you can get over the difficulty hump, however, Supreme Commander is an amazing strategy achievement.

Supreme, but Flawed

Just the same, as polished, sharp, and truly intense as Supreme Commander is, the heavy-duty hardware requirements and extreme difficulty level hinders the game’s ability to match the accessibility of its predecessor. The game is a technological marvel, a wargame with a massive scale that works both on and offline, but the almost exhausting level of army building, upgrading your units, and discovering solutions to the unforgiving battlefield puzzles the missions throw at you makes it hard to recommend Supreme Commander to anyone new to the genre. That said, this is still one of the most impressive and important strategy games in recent memory.

Article by: Jason D’Aprile
Video produced by: Matt Keil