Supreme Commander
	Developer	Gas Powered Games
	Publisher	THQ
	Rating	M
PC

If you have spent as much time as me looking at video gaming, you will see trends and ideas be reused, sometimes with new game-play thrown into the mix; usually it is simply a matter of rehashing an idea in a new technical arena.  Flashier graphics, bigger environments the inclusion of a feature technically unfeasible in the past, but overall the same ideas dredged up for a new generation of game players.

That sounded bad, but is not necessarily the case.  Many older games, like movies (though did we really need a new Rollerball?) deserve a touch-up to delight new audiences using the technology of today. Cave Dogs 1997 tour de force Total Annihilation is a borderline example of this.

Supreme Commander (SC) is unashamedly a reworking of TA, it has a Transformer style robotic Armoured Command Unit (ACU) in command of a robotic army of Land, Sea and Air units wholly dependent on power-plants built by the ACU or its engineers.  Units are constructed out of Mass which is mined or simple scavenged from trees or previously destroyed units and buildings.

Mostly this is still the TA game as players manage resources to build a home-base and construct a monstrous army to, well, totally annihilate the opposition.  So what has changed?

More than anything Chris Taylor (Dungeon Siege, Total Aninihilation) and his team have expanded the scope of battle.  No longer are the combatants restricted to a skirmish style of RTS.  In SC maps can be tens of square kilometres in size including both sea and land objectives.  The most immediate effect of this scale is the camera zooming available.  Players are able to zoom close into the action for a pointless exploration of the games eye-candy abilities.  More meaningful is the ability to zoom out to a point where the whole map is visible, with most of the games units reduced to icons on said map.

Playing one of three – to be truthful, almost identical – factions, veteran RTS gamers will be immediately at home with the majority of what SC has to offer.  Places where they may get tripped up will include the clunky group select mechanism, which just doesn’t work as well as it could.  During the single player campaign, you will be kept on your toes as dynamic objectives present themselves within each mission, the mission map can expand in response to these new objectives, making it difficult to plan – a wonderful inclusion.