Supreme Commander Single-Player Demo

Every once in a while, the video games industry makes a step forward and a title comes along that basically redefines the genre, setting new standards for the games that follow. While these revolutions are not always remembered or taken into account, they do leave a mark on the genre and a solid fan base in their wake.

Supreme Commander is an RTS that managed to make strategy games fun again, as well as revolutionize the mechanics, come up with new ones and increase the scale of the war by quite a bit. While the core idea is still rather familiar, especially since it was developed by the same people who came up the brilliant Total Annihilation series, there are many gimmicks that differentiate the game from anything else out on the market.

To start off with, there are three factions to choose from: The Cybran Nation, the United Earth Federation and the Aeon Illuminate, each one of which has a rich back story and a different gameplay style. There's a different campaign for each race, which gives you more insight into their struggle and the chance to learn how to take advantage of their strengths in battle.

One of the most important mechanics of the game is the zoom function, which allows you to quickly get an overview on the battlefield, or jump into the heart of the battle. By zooming out as much as you can, the entire map becomes visible and you can clearly observe the positioning of your army, as well as any enemy forces that are visible. You also get a sense of the huge scale of the game, since the maps are usually more than 20 square kilometers wide, which leaves plenty of room for war.

Speaking of which, the players are allowed to build more than a thousand units during skirmish matches and use them all to destroy the enemy forces. The massive number of troops also allows for basically any tactics you can think off, not to mention the fact that there are both land, sea and air units involved. Naturally, this might be a bit too much to handle for most people at first, but the feeling passes after a few matches, when you realize that you put your wildest strategies into practice.

Finally, Supreme Commander does not disappoint from a technical point of view either, since the graphic engine is more than capable to handle thousands of units at the same time and render them in high resolution as well. Naturally, this might put a stress on your system, especially since the game was specifically designed to take advantage of multi-core processors and dual monitors.