Not too bad, not too good, Supreme commander. A review for those who have extensive RTS experience
Some might find my review offensive because they can't see through the beautiful graphics and entertaining story that takes place in the cutscenes and intermissions, in terms of entertainment value supreme commander is fun, but at the fundamental game mechanical level, it's the same as previous RTS games, except with updated graphics. Not a bad thing by a long shot, but I do not see, supreme commander becoming the next Starcraft of the RTS world.
The added strategic features like elevation in this game fall a bit flat in their poor implementation, having the high ground doesn't net you much if anything at all in supreme commander. Also the way the games terrain is rendered is very awkward, it always looks very 2D when zoomed out and makes it hard to distinguish between elevation levels on certain maps. Which you may find messes with your strategies because the way the terrain is rendered. You see when you are zoomed out at a distance the terrain does not give you a very clear picture as to it's height. You can find out its elevation by zooming in as close as possible to "ground view" but you shouldn't have to since most of the game you'll be so busy simply pumping out units and managing your entire army from the theater of war perspective (i.e. zoomed ou so you can look at the whole map, with 2D icons representing your units).
Most of the single player campaign is simply a mud flinging fest, it's basically an excuse for multiplayer. The single player campaign is easy for RTS pro's because of rather stupid nature of the AI. It will be great for first time players but for experienced RTS freaks like myself, it is ho-hum.
The single player game basically copy's starcraft's model of story telling (which is a good thing), and while the 3D rendered movies are good and the story pretty cool... the in game parts of Supreme commander for the most part simply feels like a bunch of randomly thrown together RTS levels with all the same things that have been rehashed and done to the nth degree over the last 10 years or so, in every other real time strategy game. The game feels at once somewhat refreshing and stale.
Some cool new features are units you can't control precisely and actually obey some kind of laws of physics: Planes actually have to arc in the air similar to real aircraft to turn around and you cannot change this, this means you can't micro units as easily.
Another problem is that many units dominate, you will find yourself most of the time producing air units and long range ground units. SC suffers from all the same flaws most RTS's do, except worse: Many units (like the super units) in SC take way too damn long to complete, the games pace is very slow due to the long unit production times, even with engineers. The game itself is not bad as a single player game, its fun and enjoyable and I'd like to see a sequel, but I have played so many RTS's it's hard to find joy in the genre that has for the most part turned completely stale with incremental upgrades and who's only main attraction no is graphical updates to old gameplay.