Supreme Commander

Game companies and publishers have been trying for a while now to mainstream Real Time Strategy games on consoles. Ubisoft has the upcoming Endwar coming on consoles and EA also has Command And Conquer 3 coming out on consoles. Supreme Commander was a huge hit for the PC when it came out in February 2007, but now it's 2008, and it's on consoles. There are a lot of great things about RTS's. A lot of which being able to feel like a Supreme Commander (fitting name, no?) of an army. Not only this, but you build your army. Choose which and how many of each tank or scout group you want, and then boss them around. Now take everything epic about this, and imagine it was badly ported to a system that has a bad controller for the RTS, and isn't much fun at all. That's Supreme Commander on the Xbox 360 in a nutshell.

Some PC owners will tell you that an RTS game on the consoles will never be able to stand up to the behemoth of all RTS-playing systems, the PC. The fact of the matter is, the Xbox 360's controller is just awkward in your hands when you're playing Supreme Commander. You wish you had a mouse and keyboard. It's hard to move around, it's hard to look in different places, it's hard to do just about everything but lose at Supreme Commander due to it's horrible controls. Not only is the controller itself awkward to use, but the button layout of the whole game is broken. The controls are hard to remember, awkward to use, and basically just broken all together.

The controls lead, of course, to the gameplay. What exactly are you controlling? Well, a hell of a lot of Robots, basically. If you've never played an RTS before, then there's a few things you should know. First off, you build a bunch of battalions, or small groups of your army to go different places in the map. You send them to fight enemy groups, send them to get resources, send them to go to the enemy base, wherever. However, it's hard to choose who and what you're sending where. You'll click on a group of them, but them and another group will be highlighted. This can get extremely frustrating when you're trying to pick the right group for the job. But I guess it does do a halfway decent job of getting the gameplay from the PC to the 360, which is no small feet.

One thing that was ported nothing short of horribly, were the graphics. This game doesn't look good at all. There are a lot of rough textures, the maps don't seem epic and seem a little badly designed, and the things you're fighting with, the mechs, I guess you could call them, look bad as well. Overall this game is an unpolished game that seems like it was rushed, but where that really shows is in the graphics. It becomes very clear that they just wanted to put this game out ASAP.

There are a lot of things wrong with Supreme Commander, but what's right is the idea. You can see that the developers of this game were trying to capture everything about the PC games and bring it over to the 360, but they just couldn't get it right. They tried on the gameplay, they tried on the controls, but nothing really went all that right. When it comes to games like this, where a particular genre is big on one system, and they try to bring it to the other systems, it's going to be tough. You might, and probably won't, get it on your first try, and that's why Supreme Commander is breaking ground and paving a road for other's to try. The way I look at it, Supreme Commander isn't a cash in, but a valiant attempt to do something very hard, but failing.

All in all, the game is just alright. There's a lot of bad things about it to say the least, but it really is a great effort to do something very hard. For this, I applaud Gas Powered Games and Aspyr Media, but overall, this game just isn't worth your money or your time. The graphics are bad and dated, the gameplay isn't really all that fun, there's about half the mechs there were in the PC version, they made the maps smaller, and it basically just lost the epic feel that everyone loves from RTS games. If you're looking for a fun Real Time Strategy game, and don't have a PC, I'd look elsewhere. Command and Conquer, and The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth II are both viable options.