The scenarios themselves leave a lot to be desired. As do the tutorials. The tutorials do exactly what you would expect them to do, act as a primer or the interface and game play. Problem is, the very first scenario you choose (and it doesn’t matter which scenario it is) will ask you to do something you haven’t learned yet.

For example: I chose the beginner political scenario to be my first. In this scenario the user assumes the role of Turkey and you objective is to guide your country along the road to political and economic freedom by joining the European Union Treaty. We all know the EU is very real and the Super Power 2 version is composed of the same members and follows the same tenets including criteria for selection into the treaty. Which is a good thing since I couldn’t find a way to pull up the treaty in a window and see what the criteria was, nor the current members. The scenario briefing includes a few tips to accomplish your mission including such things as “establish diplomatic relations with current treaty members” and “increase your nations economy”. Fine suggestions, but how do I actually do that? The tutorials certainly don’t cover it. As it turns out I took a wild stab. First I put the game on pause to make sure I didn’t screw up too badly and then I selected a member of the EU in the real world, Italy. With a country selected it was possible to root around in the windows until I found the one that showed all of the treaties that country we currently a member of and selected the European Union Treaty. By double clicking on this treaty I was finally able to pull up a window that not only showed the selection criteria, but also the current members of the treaty and a list of eligible members. Oddly enough, Turkey was listed as an eligible member and the “Join” button was active. So I clicked the button. Scenario completed, thank you for playing. In less than one minute of in game time and perhaps ten minutes of my time, I had managed to successfully complete the first scenario without doing anything but navigate windows.

But the scenario problem goes beyond a simple oversight like the one above. No, the real problem in my opinion is that the scenarios are extremely focused on one goal type or another. Take another scenario for example, an Iraqi invasion by the United States. According to the scenario you are supposed to build some joint strike fighters and then invade and occupy Iraq. The joint strike fighters don’t appear to be a requirement of the scenario however as I simply selected every unit in the United States and sent them to attack Iraq. The “battle” was swift and painless. Occupying the country even more so. Scenario completed. The real problem here is that I didn’t have to build anything. I didn’t have to negotiate with anyone. I didn’t have to lobby congress for the funding. I didn’t have to build up my defense spending or manufacturing. You basically don’t have to care about anything but a single minded objective.

I was gratified to see that this did not extend to non-scenario, aka “Custom”, games. I chose a custom game with a goal of world domination as the objective and used China for the starting country. My first act as the top burrito of the most populous nation on earth was to invade Taiwan. Yeah, that didn’t work out so well. Unlike Iraq, whom no one likes, Taiwan has a lot of friends and the moment I set foot in their country I had half the planet descending on that little country looking to kick me out.

Now that is what I expect from a game that purports to simulate real world politics and economics. That’s not to say China can’t invade Taiwan successfully. But fist you have to build up a serious military and with that comes the buildup of the economy. It also helps if you can get some of the major players, such as Russia, on your side through diplomacy. In fact, after several hours of buildup and diplomacy, I was able to take over Taiwan and most of the other nations in the orient including Japan and Vietnam.

I would love to say that all the tedious window manipulation, button pressing and waiting finally paid off in epic battles. But I really can’t. The combat portion of the game is very simplistic. When forces meet on the globe a little “thundercloud” or “dust cloud” is presented to signal the joining of combat. From there a player can double click on the cloud to zoom into the combat or let the combat resolve itself and review the combat messages later. Drilling into the combat window shows the player a simulated terrain map on the top of the window with a “positional” map below that. The terrain style map shows the types and quantity of the forces involved, enemies on one side, allies on the other. This is also where you can watch the units kill each other off. In the lower part of the screen are white dots. The dots indicate a unit and the dots will slowly approach the center, again enemies on one side, allies on the other. This is meant to represent the battle field position of your units. When the dots meet in the middle they are now engaged in close combat. Obviously artillery and other long range units don’t need to engage in close combat so their dots need never reach the center. And in the only (yes, the ONLY) real interaction the player has in combat mode, there is a drop down menu that allows you to pick a battle style, such as “long range”.

It’s kinda cool to watch the units pop each other off and see their number dwindle. And if you abstract yourself a bit you can get pretty excited over a close battle wondering who is going to get the finally killing blow first. But after hours of tedium, the payoff simply didn’t seem worth it.

On the strange side, Super Power 2 does something I’ve seen very rarely. In addition to launching a console, the game also spawns a separate server process, even when playing a single player game. This is understandable, but somewhat confusing as the name of the server component is “Joshua Server”. In fact, a user could very well mistake this “Joshua Server” as a piece of malware since it does not reflect its affiliation with Super Power 2 in any way. After many years of experience I’ve gotten into the habit of watching exactly what is happening when a game is started. Checking CPU and Case temperature, CPU and memory use, etc. So the “Joshua Server” thing didn’t surprise me too much as the name of the initial console application is “Joshua Console”.

And finally, a pet peeve of mine is to reboot my machine. I really, really dislike poorly crafted software that forces a reboot. I can almost forgive device driver manufacturers but developers of games and applications have no excuse. When Super Power 2 forced a reboot of my computer, it hadn’t been rebooted in almost four months. I was annoyed to say the least.

In conclusion, while I personally did not care for Super Power 2, I can see where it would have some real appeal to some players. The use of real world data and real objectives is quite good. Those who “think globally” might find it really interesting to play out some global economic, political or military strategies of their own design and see how the rest of the world would react. However, I must still caution that this game is far from exciting so even the studious may lose their adoration over time.