War eternal
Coming from the developer of Total Annihilation, you'd expect pretty big things from this real-time strategy offering, and fortunately it just about lives up to your hopes and stands as fine addition to any strategy collection. There's not too much in the way of storyline but the clever mechanics and deep yet enjoyable gameplay make this one for armchair generals everywhere. The narrative revolves around a galactic conflict which has been raging for decades between three forces, and you'll step into the role of Supreme Commander of one of these factions and attempt to bring the war to a successful end (from your point of view anyway). For the most part, this features many of the usual elements of RTS games, with a focus on base building, managing resources, creating units and of course battles. However, this one features a few different aspects, such as a greater sense of scale, more diverse unit types than usual, subtle but intriguing changes to resource management and so on. Supreme Commander is perhaps not for the newcomer to the RTS genre but if you like a challenge or are a veteran, then it's really a classic example of this sort of thing. The campaign story isn't overly original but proves quite compelling anyway, while the gameplay is absolutely superb. It's very challenging stuff, but there's so much depth and range of options here that it's difficult not to enjoy it. The visuals are cracking too and the interface is highly intuitive so if you have any interest in RTS games, you need this.
