Supreme Commander Review

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The first casualty of this war is the frame-rate. That all-important strategic zoom can be halting and jumpy, and once you get a fair number of units on screen, things start to get a bit juddery from whichever perspective you view them. On top of the flick-book moments, enemy units and obstacles in the landscape have a nasty habit of cheerily blipping into view a second later than you'd like them to, and - most damagingly - on more than one occasion during the course of the main campaign, the enemy ACU may simply pop out of existence when the going gets tough - a disappearing act that often happens to coincide with most mission endgames, when you're zeroing in to finish him off after an hour or so of multi-front slog.

Finally, freezes and even the odd crash during some of the more elaborate battles are rare - but crushing - annoyances. If the game was any more forgiving in its strategy, this would still be a fairly significant problem, but given the sheer effort Supreme Commander demands from the player in getting through to the last stages of the hour-long missions, it becomes incredibly frustrating. Regular saving in case the game decides it wants to sit down for a bit to get itself together is presumably not the kind of deep strategy the developers had in mind, and even though fatal crashes and freezes are relatively uncommon, when the frame-rate begins to go and the camera starts to stick for a few seconds, Supreme Commander gives off the definite impression that this particular marriage of hardware and software is probably not going to last.

The plot is pleasantly free from irony; the presentation is less pleasantly free from decent lip-synching. [And the press site was even less pleasantly free from an appropriate screenshot. - Ed]

All of this could turn out to be a simple performance bug that can be patched at some point, but it's hard not to see it as an underlying problem caused by trying to shove such a taxing and resource-intensive game onto 360. What's easier to discern is that, with most of the cycles taken up with getting so many units acting intelligently on screen all at once (and not always - sometimes they ignore your commands and head off for a bit of a wander), the visuals have suffered dramatically. With blotchy, out-of-focus textures, lumpy, unappealing landscapes (except, it must be said, for the snowy maps, which manage to look so deep and crisp that even Good King Wenceslas would be tempted to pick up a controller and start churning out light infantry) and some fairly uninspiring unit design, it's hardly a good-looking game, and that's even before you compare it to the colourful toy-box riot of the forthcoming Red Alert 3.

Multiplayer fares better, with the smaller maps allowing for more controlled warfare, and it's important to point out that, buggy and only a little crash-prone, the game is sickly rather than definitively broken. If you've got the stomach for a couple of restarts along the way, and a few anxious moments when the big explosions kick off and the 360 starts to make noises that suggests there's an angry badger trapped inside the disk tray, then you may be able to appreciate the game's many treasures.

As in the PC version, the Cybran faction are a bunch of emo whingers.

But the lingering feeling is that you shouldn't have to put up with this kind of thing in the first place. While there's still something immensely pleasing about seeing vast swathes of units marching across the screen, you can't help but wish that the developers had thought about making the PC game's magic formula work better with the 360's hardware capabilities rather than shoving it all in and hoping for the best. To put it another way, Supreme Commander is trying to build too many land factories without enough Mass extractors running - it may work out, but it won't be pretty.