Review anarchistica 2/5 · Nov 6, 2019
More like... Mediocre Commander
SupCom2 is an improvement over the first one but still a poor game. Building up your army is easier and faster, research is a vast improvement over the tiered engineers and the campaign doesn't have the terrible terrible reveals. In SupCom1 sometimes you would build up a base and at some point the map would expand to show an enemy …
SupCom2 is an improvement over the first one but still a poor game. Building up your army is easier and faster, research is a vast improvement over the tiered engineers and the campaign doesn't have the terrible terrible reveals. In SupCom1 sometimes you would build up a base and at some point the map would expand to show an enemy in a completely different place on the map so your existing defenses would be pointless. None of that here.
The game is still quite poor. Every mission plays out the same - build up your defenses, construct 4+ land factories, amass a giant army, steamroll the enemy. The story of the campaign is utterly forgettable, punctuated only by 'twists' you can see from the start. The fact that each faction is practically identical aside from some minor changes doesn't help keep things fresh. This isn't StarCraft or Age of Empires where each faction is distinct.
There are also a number of technical problems. I experienced several crashes, especially in Skirmish mode. The game doesn't seem to autosave so you'll lose all progress. The menu is opened by pressing F10 instead of Escape, which is just bizarre. Units are hard to tell apart and hovering over one doesn't show you its name. The mini-map is implemented so poorly at some point half of my base got captured by engineers suddenly arriving from the sea without me noticing it.
Perhaps the worst problem is that it's just not very interesting. The RTS genre saw a bunch of innovation in the 2000s and this game completely missed the boat. You don't develop a retinue (DOW: Dark Crusade), choose between different units to research (SC2) or build up a deck of improvements (AOE3). There's nothing clever going on with the terrain or buildings/sites on it or whatever. It's always the exact same thing and that's just dull.
