Xbox 360

Supreme Commander

Supreme Commander proved to be an exciting adventure into a foreign universe, and an unexpected challenge. The storyline, complexity, and nearly unlimited multiplayer potential make this a title worth adding to your collection.

Ignoring the PC-to-console porting issues, RTS games simply don’t get any bigger, deeper, or more voluminous than this. So if you missed out on the Windows chapter, the Xbox 360 edition of Supreme Commander will keep you maneuvering, battling, and strategizing for weeks.

Despite the few bugs that I ran into during my sessions with Supreme Commander, the game was satisfying overall. I found myself playing for hours on end just to work my way through a single mission, which speaks volumes about SC’s replay value. Luckily the game allows players to save at any time during gameplay, like the PC version. When I wasn’t playing, I definitely felt a nonstop urge to dive back in and continue my quest for success. If you love real time strategy games and have been longing for a worthy addition to the 360 genre, give Supreme Commander a try. A long, drawn out, strenuous, rewarding try.

Kudos to the developers for trying to tackle so much material in one DVD, as a result, there is a ton of content that RTS fans will revel in. Taking the PC game and bringing it to the 360, there should have been some editorial choices made about what would translate well onto consoles. Unfortunately, design cuts were not made and porting issues were left in tact which left Supreme Commander for the 360 a case study that PC and console are still two very different platforms.

Overall, Supreme Commander for the Xbox 360 is a passable RTS, but one can tell that there is something better hidden beneath the unintuitive gameplay that unfortunately mars the experience and detracts from the fun that players could have potentially had with the game.

The controls have been nicely tuned to the controller however, alongside the majority of consol RTS, it just can’t compete with the PCs speed. The graphics are really dated and simply don’t offer enough to cause excitement. Sounds in the game really add a nice depth to the game however even these can become repetitive and the volume level also changes every once and a while With the slow down, the controller not responding every so often and not so thrilling campaign story unfortunately Supreme Commander won’t appeal to many gamers. I enjoyed most of my time with the game but I can only imagine it will be preferred by the hardcore real time strategy fans.

For all the problems with this port, Supreme Commander is a very singular RTS game. The emphasis on huge battles and great action does manage to shine through, but this release still feels half-baked. There are too many bugs to earn it a whole-hearted recommendation, and while it is far from unplayable, the PC version is vastly superior.

The greatest irony of the Xbox 360 version of Supreme Commander is that there's the guts of a really great console RTS in here. Even in its current form, there a lot of fun to be had. Cut out about 50% of the units, make the maps smaller and tighten up the bleeding edges to make a new strategic model and we might really have something. The pacing's right, the idea's right, but stuffing the entire PC version of Supreme Commander onto the 360 is just more than the poor machine can handle.

Without question, SupCom was a good attempt, but it falls short in a number of ways—not because of a failure in execution, but rather in a failure to fully consider how putting it on a console would truly hold it back. Even for a console as advanced as the Xbox 360, trying to port a PC-comparable version of SupCom to it seemed to be too much to bite off, and, sadly, the hardware clearly does choke on it too much to fully enjoy Taylor’s creation.

The end result of Supreme Commander on the 360 is that the overall quality feels like a failed experiment. Sure, Hellbent did a great job of porting over a control scheme that most would shy away from, but at the same time, the quality control involved leaves a whole lot to be desired. You can definitely play the game, but whether or not you can stomach making it through all 18 campaign stages in the face of all these issues is something else. Unless Aspyr is able to introduce a patch or two to fix some of the major technical flaws with the game, avoid this title for now.

I was really looking forward to this release in the months leading up to its launch. But the reality of said launch is a relative disaster. The PC version of the game still comes highly recommended, but steer clear of this console iteration.

Supreme Commander could have been a real-time strategy experience to rival Red Alert at its most awesome. What makes the technical issues all the more embarrassing is that this adaptation has arrived more than 18 months after the initial Windows release, so you can't help but wonder - "What the hell have the developers been doing?" All in all, instead of seizing the real-time strategy genre by storm, Supreme Commander takes one step out of the trenches and trips over its shoelaces.

SupCom enters a growing console-RTS market, with UAW as the genre's measuring stick. And while these games can work sans mouse, until the user-interface and technical issues are addressed here, SupCom can't stand toe-to-toe with the competition.

The PC version of Supreme Commander is one of the best strategy games in recent years, and is rightfully beloved for its complex tapestry of economic control and massive battles spread across sprawling maps. The Xbox 360 release attempts to deliver that great gameplay, but completely disrespects it by stuffing it into a shamefully buggy package that should never have been released in its current form.

Sometimes platform segregation is a good thing - it would have served Supreme Commander well. The game stood tall and proud on PC, but this port (with its underlying technical issues and wonky controls) doesn't translate the original's epic nature.

At its core, Supreme Commander is a good game. It's just surprising that it passed Microsoft certification in its current form. Technical issues like crashes, slowdown, impaired AI, and inexplicable momentary lockups paired with much uglier graphics than what the PC mar this release to the point of no return. The game that PC owners adored in 2007 has received a poor port to Xbox 360 that is more of a disappointment than anything else.

To top it all off, the framerate constantly chugs. Play Supreme Commander with a mouse and keyboard, or don't play it at all.

Supreme Commander is another in a long line of ill-conceived, misguided PC ports. I’d love to see a developer come up with a satisfying way to translate the RTS genre to consoles, but in the meantime, it’s patently clear that Supreme Commander is the wrong way. But perhaps there's still hope. There’s a reason Americans have an average of 2.5 children; it usually takes one and a half total disasters to get one of them to turn out right.