Supreme Commander Hands-on

January 18, 2008 - We wouldn't be all that surprised if you didn't follow Supreme Commander on PC too closely. It's a beast of a strategy game that can make your rig cry with hundreds of active units and a complex management system. It might be time for you to start paying attention now that it's coming to 360 sometime around mid-March. This hardcore real-time strategy game was one of the best of 2007 and this isn't any quick port. The Xbox 360 version has been in the works since October of 2006.

For a basic primer on Supreme Commander, be sure to read up on our coverage of the PC release. The console version features a new heads-up display and control interface, but stays true to the PC original in many ways. Three new units have been added along with a tutorial while console limitations forced a few things to be removed. Still the game is largely the same at its core. This version uses many of the rules laid out in the Forged Alliance expansion and has an identical campaign and map set to what you get on the PC.

We love our tech 3 battleships.
Supreme Commander's new interface makes use of the wheel select that console players will recognize from early screens and movies of Halo Wars. As soon as we picked up the controller we could tell that it's a more natural fit to an analog controller than the fan menus of Battle for Middle Earth II or Command & Conquer 3. Once you've selected a unit or building with the A Button, a tap on the d-pad brings up one of the three wheels (build, command, or group). Using the command wheel, for example, you can quickly tell one or more units to return fire, hold their ground, self-destruct, or assist another unit. It's a complex system -- Supreme Commander makes no apologies for how hardcore it is -- but in practice we found it to be entirely workable on the console.

With the default controls, there's a powerful magnetic pull on units and buildings to assist the imprecise analog stick. You can adjust its strength or turn it off entirely, something we'll definitely want to toy around with once we get more time with the game. The magnet worked well with a few units on the screen but we question how useful it would be when trying to select one unit out of a hundred.

You can wage wars zoomed all of the way out.
Adapting an RTS to the console is no easy task, but Supreme Commander has one design feature that makes it a little more controller friendly from the start. Instead of using a mini-map or hotkeys to quickly move around the playing field, Supreme Commander uses a strategic zoom that allows you to bring the action anywhere from a satellite view of the entire map down to the ground. It's done with the right analog stick and it allows you to command multiple fronts at the same time without wasting time scrolling back and forth. Simply zoom out, move the cursor a bit and zip back down. The game automatically aligns the top of the screen to north as you zoom out to prevent confusion and then uses your new cursor position as the center of the screen as you zoom back in.



If zooming in and out isn't your cup of tea, you can also use the trigger in combination with the face buttons to cycle through idle units or buildings. In fact, there are multiple ways to deliver a wide range of commands -- so many that we won't go through them all here. This is clearly a game that will reward those who invest a lot of time in it.

With such high system recommendations on the PC, it's no surprise that Supreme Commander doesn't look quite as good on the console. It looks better than the game running on the lowest settings, trust me I know. But compared to the highest settings on the PC you'll notice lower resolution textures, an absence of the biggest maps and only four player online play instead of eight. We also noticed regular dips in the framerate while playing, though the game isn't quite finished. In the final build, we were promised that the framerate would be steady while the AI simply slows down to accommodate the huge number of on-screen units.

He's probably a friendly robot.
To make up for what's missing the team has added a couple of console specific game modes. The maps being used are the same as the PC version, so not every map can be used with the new game types. Some simply wouldn't work, particularly in King of the Hill. The name is pretty self explanatory, though there are a few extra rules. Players receive more points for keeping higher tech units inside of the zone and there is a strict no-build rule within the scoring area. The other new mode is a command point game with various targets around the map that must be captured as a victory condition.

Supreme Commander isn't going to wow anyone with its visuals. As far as capturing that much ballyhooed casual audience, well it can forget about doing that too. This is a game for strategy fans that may have missed it on the PC, plain and simple.