Supreme Commander 2 review

The best tactic we’ve come up with is the Cybrannosaurus Bubblebath. A hovering triangle wafts into your base and drops a dinosaur on you. The dinosaur is large, about the size of a dinosaur, and has a robotic head that breathes fire. A moment later, 25 translucent spheres pop up around it. The shields these Adaptors generate aren’t impenetrable, but they overlap and regenerate. They cling to the dinosaur as missiles spill from his back like he’s moulting. He stomps toward your commander as if to eat him, but of course he won’t. He’s an herbivore; that would be ridiculous.

Supreme Commander is like the fever dream of a Robot Wars contestant: you control hundreds of killing machines as they clash with hundreds more over land, air and sea. In the first game that got complicated, and if you weren’t an actual Robot Wars contestant you could be forgiven for giving up. The slightest error in establishing your economy could cause it to crash, leaving you crippled while your opponent’s forces spread like a metal virus. If that was you: good news, come in. You’re going to love this.

If that wasn’t you, if you spent your Sundays in eight-hour matches battling seven other commanders for control of a battlefield the size of the Isle of Wight, it’s best not to think of this as a sequel. It’s more like a side-project, as if Giant Robots and Vast Armies left the group to form their own band without Epic Battlefields and Advanced Economics – who was always kind of a square. We don’t know whether the old band will ever get back together, but don’t go into this expecting the nerdy glory of those four in concert. You could easily miss why Supreme Commander 2 is great.

There is a counter to the Cybrannosaurus Bubblebath, we’ve discovered. It’s called the ‘Screw you, I have a Magnetron.’ You drop your dino, the shields go up, and said shields suddenly jerk across the base and are minced in a maw of spinning metal teeth. Rex, wagging his flame-gouting head from side to side to try to see what’s happening, is dragged slowly backwards into the sparky deathcogs by a megaelectromagnet, where they chew through his flesh and metal with indifference. A Magnetron would eat your commander. A Magnetron would eat God if He had any metal on Him.