Format: Windows | Developer: Gas Powered Games | Publisher: THQ | Genre: Strategy | Released: 16 February 2007

Total Annihilation might be called the Firefly of the gaming world: a critically acclaimed product that failed to find popular support and dwindled away before being kept alive as a cult institution by a dedicated fanbase. And, like Firefly, this support led to a second chance. For Firefly it was the movie Serenity: for TA, it is Supreme Commander.

Okay, first I'd like to clear something up: yes I own Total Annihilation, and yes I do indeed like it (despite a certain vague mistrust of RTS in general: I've always been a TBS man, myself). I am not, however, part of said dedicated fanbase, and I'm a tad worried that I may have created this impression among my colleagues. I didn't even know there was still a fanbase until on a whim I did a bit of research and discovered quite a lot more than I expected. On the other hand, I've played more TA than the rest of the team (I think), so hey, here goes.

Supreme Commander, or SupCom, as it seems to be universally abbreviated to, is regarded as the "spiritual sequel" to TA. That is, although it can't use the TA license or plot due to publishing wrangles, the same core gameplay concepts lie at its heart, albeit heavily augmented.

So how does the game work? At the start of your standard skirmish, you begin with just one unit: the Supreme Commander of the title, who is your in-game avatar. Equipped with powerful weaponry and armour - and, more importantly, the plans and tools to build the fundamental base of operations from which you will construct your war machine - the Commander is your most vital unit. That's why you'll rarely want him on the front lines, despite his power. He's like the king in chess: in standard multiplayer rules, if you lose him, you lose the game (the rules are customisable, mind, but more on that later).

Fortunately, you can build up an entire army of robot warriors and engineers to do your bidding for you, so it's not all bad. The Commander can build "level 1 tech": that is, the basic resource procurement and unit manufacturing structures to get your base off the ground. There are two resources in SupCom: energy and mass (TA veterans will remember energy and metal as the two key resources). The level of these resources changes continuously, with income being produced by your power generators and mass extractors, and expenditure through the construction of units and buildings, and sometimes from the firing of weapons. "One-off" boosts to mass production can be obtained by reclaiming scrap metal from the battlefield, should you find that you're trying to construct more stuff than your extractors can cope with.

Unit factories come in three obvious flavours: land, air and sea. Each factory can produce an array of specialised units, from unarmed scouts through front line assault units to artillery pieces, from fighters to bombers to anti-aircraft batteries. They can also produce a far more generalised unit known as the Engineer. Engineers are unarmed, but like the Commander they can construct defences, resource collectors and factories - and their specialised nature allows them to construct more different things than the Commander. They are all-terrain and amphibious, allowing them to build water structures as well. Finally, factories can take time out from production to upgrade themselves, allowing construction of more powerful warriors and more ingenious engineers with a wider variety of building plans (fortunately, the Factories and Engineers are back-compatible: if you have a sudden, urgent need for Level 1 Tech, the Level 3 Factories can provide). There are three standard levels of tech, plus a fourth "experimental" level - read giant war-winning machines here - constructible only by a Level 3 Engineer.

So far, so generic strategy game. What sets SupCom apart? Well, first of all is something it inherits from TA: a physics engine that, well, uses physics. Instead of making up hidden stat tables and saying "This cover provides a certain amount of damage reduction" or "This terrain is elevated, so units standing on it will have increased range" or "This is a moving target, so it will be harder to hit", the game just lets the units fire their shells and leave the results to the physics engine. Artillery shells fired from a hill onto a plain below can have a greater range because that's how projectile motion works. The result is a combat mechanic that is intuitive because... well, it does what you'd expect it to do in real life.

Okay, so that would have sounded more impressive in 1997, when TA was released. Something that is seriously impressive, however, is the Waypoint system which lets you direct troop movements, patrols, building queues, rally points and much more. Building on an order queueing system in TA that was already quite advanced for its day, holding down Shift in SupCom will bring up an array of colour: the blues of troop movements and the sweeping curves of your air patrols, the reds of units preparing to engage the enemy, the yellows of the Engineers as they wheel away at improving and maintaining your base, the purples of your air transports' ferry paths. Like a vector art program, you can click on these nodes and adjust them to better serve the purposes of your war machine.

The waypoints system is both innovative and stylish

It may sound complicated, but you could just need it, because SupCom's other notable feature is its scale. One of the stated aims of the developers is to put the strategy back into real-time strategy, by allowing combat on maps of an unprecedented size. On the biggest maps, you will need to direct the battle on many fronts at once. Fortunately, the game is accompanied by a flexible zooming system that can take you from strategic overview of the entire map down to the tactical minutiae of an individual battle. This is a game of tremendous ambition and scope, and covering it all in a review like this based off only a few hours' gameplay is tricky. There are a variety of multiplayer options available (and if you can't find enough friends with the game, the Skirmish mode is essentially Multiplayer with AI opponents).

There are a couple of flies in the ointment, though. Fly one is that SupCom is a game that demands as much as it gives. Eight gigabytes of my hard drive were sacrificed to the gods of this particular brand of war, and let's just say that if I can't find a way to recombine my split hard drive (which Dell, in their infinite wisdom, decided I would want on my new machine without asking me), another game of this size would fill it up completely. In terms of the other specs, while a high-range up-to-date specialised gaming machine would have no trouble running the game, the average mid-range PC will just squeak home with the recommended requirements. I noticed the occasional bit of slowdown while playing.

Fly two is that, despite the attempts at intuitive design, the game is still somewhat overwhelming. I am admittedly, as I have said, not a hardened RTS player: I don't quite have the mentality to ensure my highly complex military machine is running at optimum efficiency at all times. The first mission of one of the three Campaigns (Cybran) alone pushed me, as wave after wave of my gallant robot things got done in by some surprisingly tough enemy defences, and characters on my own side kept sending messages essentially saying "Get on with it, you lazy bast, we haven't got all day!". Completing the first mission took an hour and a half, as objective after objective was piled on me. As an aside, the various sizes of the units, though impressive and all, can make spotting a tiny Engineer or scout among the throng of your base a bit of a trial. The grouping and cycling icons in the top right help with this sort of thing, but it still takes time to get used to.

Is that an Engineer standing next to my Commander, or a speck of fly dirt?

However, I'm going to be charitable and assume you are a genius RTS player with a computer so vast and powerful it eats small stars for breakfast, and give this game a 9 for Substance, because really it deserves no less even with its flaws. The game's scope and ambition has to be applauded.

One of the acknowledged weaknesses of TA was apparantly its plot and characterisation. Personally I liked the basic idea of the plot, although I admit it ended up rather underdeveloped when it came to the actual campaign. Neither side lent itself particularly well to empathy, as it can be summarised as "robots vs. clones in giant robot suits".

SupCom works these ideas over and spits out something that might be said to have a lot of details and bases of the TA universe, but fleshed out and given a different, new, overplot.

Two of your superiors have a nice chat about where they're sending you this time

There are three factions to choose from. We have the United Earth Federation, looking to reunite the now disparate peoples of the old Earth Empire in a new age of unity and brotherhood, the Aeon Illuminate, a bunch of people who made contact with a now genocidally exterminated race of aliens and, despite their philosophy of peace and enlightenment now harbour a deep belief that those who will not follow their Way must be cleansed from the galaxy, and the Cybran Nation, looking to forge a republic of the Symbiote (man-machine hybrid) underclasses and liberate their oppressed brethren. The factions have been fighting a three-way struggle for a thousand years in what is known as the Infinite War. Personally, I'm supporting the Cybrans - their goal seems the most noble to me - although it seems to be a classic example of the atrocities that can happen when different sets of "good" people war with each other. The three-way nature of the conflict adds an interesting spin to the plot. I can't say I've researched it to a massive extent, but the foundations seem promising. And there are actual characters on each side this time, which is something.

One notable absence though, from both TA and this, that can be found in series such as Command and Conquer and Warcraft, is character and personality in your units in the field. Both aforesaid series are famous for the witty quips of their characters, something lacking in the robotic units of TA and SupCom. It's a small thing that doesn't bother me overly, but it may put you off.

The graphics, although not going to win any "wow, look at the sunset glinting through those trees... wait, why is my character dead?" fanatics over, probably set a new high for the RTS genre. The units are plenty detailed if you zoom in on them enough. The explosions and rocket tracers and the bright colours of the waypoint system have a definite style to them. On the other hand, sometimes it can be tricky to tell what's going on: you'll hear the odd random explosion and go "What the heck was that?" But I guess that can be considered part of the atmosphere: war is supposed to be a bit panicky at times.

I'm not one for big orchestral scores in computer games - musically, my brain still lives in the mid-90s - but I'll say one thing about the SupCom music: it hasn't made me turn it off yet. Damning with faint praise, perhaps, but I'd say that anything that doesn't make me turn it off is doing its job, wouldn't you? One thing I've noticed, though: it appears to use the same recurring tune over and over quite a bit, so you may begin to balk at that after a while.

I think I'll give SupCom an 8 for style. It's pretty excellent, but there are a few niggly bits where it could be improved, and maybe one or two lessons that weren't learnt from TA.

Heh. Tricky one, this. On one side is the whole "spiritual sequel to TA thing". On the other is the whole "well, I like RTSes, but they just don't like me...". It's one of those occasions where I just know that my personal judgement will err rather on the harsh side. As a result, I'm going to finish off with an 8 for Slant, but a 9 overall. And I don't think I can say fairer than that. When all's said and done, I don't want to let a few little niggles in the back of my mind get in the way of what, considered objectively, may just be one of the great real time strategy games of all... well, time.

Ben can do it, so can I. I have a very important announcement to make:

SHIP ON LEGS

I feel this merits a raising of the Slant mark to 9.

The more I play this game, the more I realise what other people mean about performance slowdown. I was only touching the tip of the iceberg when I was skimming over this game to deliver my review. Get into a reasonably-developed battle against a horde of opponents and watch your computer go insane. I still like it enough that I'm not going to do a Ben and drop the mark to 2/10, but it still merits a chip down to 8/10, for Slant and overall score. If you have a stupidly high-powered rig and a lust for what is probably the ultimate RTS, then ignore this comment. I'm giving what I feel is my honest opinion of the game. I like RTS, but not to an amazing degree, and I feel I may have been overawed in my initial SupCom analysis. In hindsight, it's not fair for me to give this game a better mark than Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

The niggling thing at the back of my mind is the way we've been quoted by THQ as saying "9/10". I mean, it's one thing to give a game a less-than-the-expected-9/10 score, quite another to "pretend" to give a good one and then change it. Okay, I did that with AoE DS, but that was before I realised we were being quoted. Maybe I should do something about this.

But for now, 8/10 it is.

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