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Tuesday, 12 June 2007 |
Supreme Commander is like dunking your eyeballs into a giant tub of neon gnats-a glowing terrarium where whirring battalions of robot critters wade, lemminglike, into battle...or circle like hornets, transforming your screen into something like Star Wars: Episode One meets Tron. Think "ostentatious" on a scale that mocks anything you've played before (without mods, anyway), reined in by a sleek, muscular interface...and you end up with a respectable enough RTS that almost outpaces its own towerinq hype.
Almost, but not entirely: For all its pomp and circumstance, SupCom's pretty conventional. and it's easy to see why. Like in Taylor's Total Annihilation, you have to secure and defend lodes of -mass" and lay rows of power generators to produce "energy," then balance the precarious consumption rate of either to build land, air, and sea forces before winging the whole kit and caboodle at your opponents. Grind. Build. Attack. In light of all the fawning previews, it almost makes SupCom feel like another drive-by victim of PR tall talk.
Except that it's not, thanks to a few saving graces. Chalk the first up to Taylor's penchant for supersizing everything he touches. In SupCom. this takes the form of "strategic zoom," which involves blasting the camera into orbit with your mouse wheel and observing as your trundling units become tiny 2D symbols. Instead of bounding between scuffles from just a few stories up, you hover like a satellite, eyeballing hundreds of units spread across gargantuan maps. |
Games 