I tried the demo for Supreme Commander 2 this week. And man what a let down. It’s like Square and GPG turned an original novel into a mass market paperback romance. The first mistake: you have to have Steam to download the demo. I can see why GPG is worried about piracy. But its the demo for crying out loud. And then guess whats next you are forced to watch nearly a whole minute of company logo animations. You better be able to skip it in the real

Their technology tree is the only thing that differentiates it from a futuristic Command and Conquer clone. You cant even queue up units if you don’t have the resources available. You can set a factory to repeat but sometimes you just want 20 light tanks then 5 AA, 45 Heavy tanks. I guess that is too complicated for the average mass gamer. (Which are who they are obviously shooting for. Definitely not fans of SupCom 1. And fans of Total Annihilation well… there’s a reason TA still has an active community.) Engineers can not help others to build structures and only 3 engineers can assist a factory at a time.

There are no tiers either. You have to research technology in order to get unit upgrades as well as the severely weakened experimental units. I really get bored of researching the same techs every single game. Like in WC3 and AOE. They change it up a little bit by having a lot of a choices and having to research the proper prerequisites. Apparently the majority of the gameplay for multiplayer is planning which techs to research first.

The strategic map view is pretty much pointless. Partly because the maps are tiny. The unit textures for the demo at least are super bright and washed out like your playing with model airplanes. I mean bright blue and bright yellow have never went together. The poly count is higher however. And the water doesn’t look half as good as in SupCom1.

Screenshots
Supcom UEF ACU
Supcom 2 UEF ACU
Supcom Waves
Supcom 2 Water

And the story consisted of annoying talking heads bickering. I will still google the cut scenes however.

If you have never played Total Annihilation, Spring or Supreme Commander then maybe this could be a fun game, but for those who have played a real RTS look again. All in all it looks a lot more like a prequel or even a no brand name rip off than a sequel.