Review by: Troy Goodfellow

Though it is easy to mock the alleged wisdom of crowds, crowds that like the Jonas Brothers and Twilight and Farmville, accessibility is something we should applaud in game design. The majestic and titanic Supreme Commander frightened even some hardcore real time strategy veterans, so you can't fault Gas Powered Games for taking a step back and saying "How do we get more people to play our awesome giant robot game?" I know I don't want to live in a world where giant armored mechs are not a killer app.

The result of this refinement is a Supreme Commander 2 that is recognizable as a sequel based on its theme and core ideas but that leaves aside much of the annoying stuff that made the first game such a pain to figure out. Your economy is still centered on the accumulation of Mass and Energy, but now you can't spend what you don't have preventing those weird spikes and dips in building that frustrated people not well-versed in how that system worked. You still build a range of factories and structures but you don't have to worry about energy efficient template patterns to maximize output. The tech tree is still full of mighty "experimental" fighting units but they aren't endgame stuff – you will get a lot of mileage out of what were once considered "Tier 1" expendable crap units.

In short, this is a traditional RTS that has evolved out of a very untraditional model. Maps are more reasonably sized, research makes more intuitive sense, and defensive towers are formidable but not impregnable. Every RTS player will be immediately comfortable playing SupCom2. The factions are more distinct than they were in the original game, with one even having no navy (though its amphibious units obviate the need). Because you unlock experimental units earlier in SupCom 2 than you do in the first game, this variety is more readily apparent. The differences aren't stark, of course. There is a rough equivalence between factions that means that you won't need to do a lot of studying to learn how they play – this isn’t Starcraft. But the small differences do mean there is more color in what was otherwise a bunch of groups that, to the uninitiated, had only cosmetic variations below the top tier units.

It's a shame that Supreme Commander 2 isn't a great single player game. In skirmish mode, the normal AI opponents are simply unable or unwilling to move beyond the trickling of units towards your base. This is one of the few RTS games that rewards turtling (your ACU is a strong defender on its own, early rushing units are fragile) so you can choose to play against an AI that will follow this strategy. On Hard and Cheating levels of difficulty, the challenge is greater but still very weak for anyone with a passing familiarity with the genre. If you choose three or four opponents, you will have your hands full, but even then it is more putting out fires than stopping Doomsday.