Supreme Commander 2 on the Xbox 360 makes for a far better effort than the previous port of the PC strategy title did with the original. While the first game was plagued with a variety of technical issues, the follow-up I’m reviewing here sports more polish, more accessibility, and just an overall better design sense than the first game ever did. While there are some issues present with this game, they’re not enough to hinder my enjoyment of it, or to cause any big headaches in general. If you’ve been looking for a solid PC to 360 port of a RTS title, well, this is probably your best bet.
Like the first title, Supreme Commander 2 puts a heavy emphasis on large-scale battle. Whether you’re in one of the 18 scenarios that make up the campaign mode of the game, battling it out with AI opponents in skirmish mode, or taking your game online to fight against three other opponents, you can command an army of over 200 individual units. With most RTS games, having an army of that scale could end up being pretty messy, but SupCom2 makes use of the ability to scale the camera way out from the battlefield, giving you a simplified look at the action below while allowing you to still command groups of units and manipulate them around the battlefield with relative ease. It’s also a game that benefits from mixed unit formations, as opposed to sticking all of your ground units or air units on separate task forces, which makes manipulating this large-scale war far easier than other RTS title that would try a similar approach.
While the PC version probably boasts some sharper displays than what we get with the Xbox 360 version, it’s hard to deny that this is a better looking game than the first was. The units are more varied, and while the textures when zoomed in are pretty simplistic, the overall use of color is a little broader here, making things more vibrant and overall more pleasing to look at for extended periods of time. There’s some really cool design work put into the high-end experimental units you can unlock, and while a few of them are returning from the original SupCom, there are plenty of new ones that are pretty neat to check out. It’s a shame that on the sound side of things this game is a little bit of a mess, it doesn’t handle the frequent explosion noises that well, and I had plenty of instances where the sound would cut out after a particularly nasty mess, usually a nuke going off or an ACU being destroyed. It was annoying enough that I ended up playing with the volume turned down pretty low, and it’s pretty much the biggest technical shortcoming this particular port has.
