If you're totally familiar with the rules of Supreme Commander, having to survive those rules being broken by your opponent offers a thrilling new test of your abilities that you wouldn't get if Forged Alliance played fair. So, you're able to employ your preferred strategy, and not, as in SupCom, have to make do with whatever limited death-machines the mission doles out to you. From the very start of the six-mission (each taking several hours, remember) campaign, you've got access to almost all the toys in your toybox, with Forged Alliance's shiny new ones gifted to you as the game goes along. Which is exactly what long-term SupCom players signed up for - they want war on a massive, challenging scale, not to go through the motions again. Then again, this is a grim future where there is only war, to coin a phrase. There's still little sense of life or character to any of the maps. Add to that your superiors constantly bellowing unreasonable orders at you, which if followed tend to result in a quick and humiliating death (hint: ignore them, and attack in your own time), and when the mission's finally over, you won't feel triumphant as much as you will relieved. It's distractingly artificial - try to analyse why all these guys have been just off-screen, conveniently ignoring you until now, and the whole thing feels utterly ridiculous - as well as punishing. The problem is that it doesn't ever make you feel like you've achieved anything - all it does is shout orders to keep running up that hill (Kate Bush would surely understand SupCom's trials).
The justified point is that war is big and relentless - this is, after all, Supreme Commander, not Reasonably Big Commander. Your hard-earned victory becomes a desperate fight for survival. It also immediately throws everything it's got at you, ludicrous waves of drones and tanks and planes and battleships and submarines and skyscraper-high deathbots that'll often wipe-out half of what you've spent the last hour building in one fell, unfair swoop. When the game zooms out, it doesn't, as its parent did, merely task you with a new enemy base to destroy. Its oft-expanding maps are longer - the first one alone took me almost three hours - and it cheats like a bastard to boot. Note my embarrassing mass deficit here (and in the game, etc).įorged Alliance is even more unforgiving. Upon apparently vanquishing your foes, the map grows, revealing some hitherto unseen threat on a remote new corner rather than granting you the sense of achievement of a whole new level.
If you played campaign mode in the original SupCom, you'll know the faint horror of the phrase 'Operational area expanded'. It never rewards you with brief moments of pleasure during its crazy-long levels - it just points up at the yards and yards of sharp slope still ahead of you, and laughs at you. It's a fabulous multiplayer game, but in single-player it's cruel and cold. It thinks making the angle of incline ever-sharper is entertainment in itself. This standalone expansion for none-more-massive RTS Supreme Commander doesn't want you to stop and have a giggle during its arduous uphill journey. Where I'll have to play more Forged Alliance. Just that little bit of reward en route, no matter how silly, made the struggle so much more bearable. Woah-oh-oh-oh, sweet child of mi-i-i-iyyyne. The guy in there sees me and freezes, his fingers also mid air-guitar. I can't help but glance in the window of the house as I pass, hoping to see the face of my personal Jesus. I half-grin, and start walking again, fingers unconsciously miming Guitar Hero buttons. There's a pause, and then an unmistakable guitarline snakes out into the cold, quiet air. Why do I do it? Shouldn't the journey be as important as the destination? A light flicks on in a house just ahead of me. There's probably another ten or fifteen minutes to go when I grind to a sudden halt, and sigh. It's cold, it's dark, I'm tired and I'm bored. It's a forty minute journey, most of it steeply uphill. A chilly November evening, and I'm walking home from town.