Supreme Commander Review

Fitting a square peg into a Koch Snowflake-shaped hole.

Like the Balkans, porting PC games to consoles has a long and troubled history. Most offspring of the PC-console relationship come out looking like the product of many generations of deliberate and careful inbreeding. Some genres—like FPS games—have translated well, while others—like RTS games and MMOs—haven’t fared so well. The trip from PC-land to Console-vania is a treacherous one and is fraught with great peril, with only a select few surviving the journey intact.

[image1]Real-time strategy games are only now starting to prove that they, too, might be able to make the transition to consoles, but Supreme Commander, unfortunately, is not one of those games. In its console incarnation, it looks like the three-eyed, seven-fingered little sibling of its brilliant PC counterpart. You can see the resemblance as the 360 iteration shares many of the qualities that made the original great, but it’s impossible to ignore the console version’s off-the-charts freak quotient.

Despite its many missteps, what remains intact is the original’s solid RTS gameplay – collect resources, build structures, manage units, and kick ass. It’s a tried-and-true formula for the genre, and it works here. In campaign mode, you will get the chance to play as each of the three different races, each with their own distinct look. There are also short cinematic sequences giving you token bits of plot, but I’ve always felt that, like a game of chess, good RTS games can do without story altogether. The story provides some context, but really this game’s all about strategic play.

Unlike the units in other RTS games such as Age of Empires or Starcraft, each race in Supreme Commander are more alike than they are different. Here, you spend far less time doing “rock-paper-scissors”-style strategizing since each race shares many of the same core unit types, even if they appear different on the surface. Instead, the strategic focus of Supreme Commander is on scale. As you progress through the main campaign, you are presented with larger and larger map sizes and control larger and larger masses of units. But herein lies the first signs of the console version’s weakness compared to its far superior PC progenitor.

While scaling the map in and out, you’ll discover the console version’s severe technical shortcomings. You’ll hit every shape and size of erratic slowdown, pause, and lockup. While scaled back from the map, you run into far fewer problems. But as you get in close to your units, expect frequent and maddening hiccups. Even with just a few units, if you scroll along the terrain at the closest scale, the game will be stuttering more than a frightened Porky Pig trying to pick a peck of pickled peppers. With any more units on screen, it’s downright unplayable at close range.

[image2]Does this make the game as a whole impossible to play? That depends on your tolerance. All I can say for sure is that if my PC were running the game this poorly, I’d knock the graphics sliders down a few notches to smooth things out. Obviously there’s no way to do this on a console, so—just like your inbred little sibling—you’re stuck with the game as is.

The other major hurdle to this game’s existence on a console is in the control scheme. PC gamers are used to—and even expect—games to have a complicated set of controls. Learning all the hotkeys, shortcuts, and basic controls takes some getting used to for any keyboard-driven title. But usually games of a particular genre share many control conventions that cover all games of that genre. However, since RTS games haven’t been well established on consoles, there are no standard control layouts.

Learning the controls for Supreme Commander will take a while. You’ll eventually get the hang of it, but it will take constant reminders, frequent manual consultations, and much fumbling around before you get it all straight. The d-pad is used to bring up the wheel-shaped command menus, but different units and buildings often use different menus, so learning which direction to push for a command for each unit takes lots of practice, and the menu structure continues to get more complex as the game progresses. There aren’t many shortcuts or hotkeys to simplify the process, and the shortcuts that do exist don’t follow a very predictable pattern.

I’ll put it this way: If I had typed this review using just one finger, I’d eventually get faster at it, but it still would feel horribly inefficient compared to using all ten. This is how it feels to play Supreme Commander on a console. It’s possible, but it’s also perpetually frustrating.

[image3]Worse, every problem that exists in the single-player mode carries over into online play. You can play with up to three other players via Xbox Live in head-to-head games with a wide variety of customizable play options, but you’ll all be sharing in the pains and disgust of the title’s array of technical issues. The core game is good enough that you can sense that if some of these issues had been worked out, this could have been a great game to play online, but your hopes will be continually dashed by the harsh realities of thi… thi… thi… thi… this incredibly lazy port.

It may be that RTS games will find a way to work well on consoles in the future (Halo Wars?). But it may also be that some genres just aren’t well suited to consoles. Back in the day, you wouldn’t have expected an NES version of a text-based PC adventure title. There’s only so many words one can type using only an “A” and a “B” button. Telling “abba” to “baa” or having “bab” pick up a “baba” gets old pretty quickly. There’s a reason text-based games never took off on consoles. Similarly, it will take a total re-imagining of the RTS genre—like what Oblivion did for RPGs—to make the genre’s leap from PCs work.

Supreme Commander is another in a long line of ill-conceived, misguided PC ports. I’d love to see a developer come up with a satisfying way to translate the RTS genre to consoles, but in the meantime, it’s patently clear that Supreme Commander is the wrong way. But perhaps there’s still hope. There’s a reason Americans have an average of 2.5 children; it usually takes one and a half total disasters to get one of them to turn out right.