Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 4.0 stars Excellent
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 8.5 (4.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Jason Ocampo
• Reviewed on: 11/06/2007
• Updated on: 11/07/2007
• Released on: 11/06/2007
• Originally published on GameSpot: Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance (PC) Review

It's hard to come up with a real-time strategy game that's as large and ambitious as Supreme Commander, which came out at the beginning of this year. The spiritual successor to 1997's famed Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander is a sci-fi strategy game that occurs on a scale far larger than regular RTS games. With battlefields that are as large as 40-by-40 square kilometers (or even 81-by-81 in skirmish and multiplayer), the game offers a lot of flexibility and room. When you flash forward to the end of the year, we get Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. What's impressive is the amount of stuff that developer Gas Powered Games has managed to squeeze into the standalone expansion in relatively little time.

Forged Alliance delivers six massive new single-player missions, as well as a slew of welcome improvements and enhancements. These include a new user interface, a graphical upgrade, and a fourth playable faction. The game continues the story of the 1,000-year old Infinite War, where three warring factions of humanity have slugged it out against one another. There are the regular humans in the United Earth Federation, the cybernetic humans in the Cybran Nation, and the alien-influenced humans in the Aeon Illuminate. The end of Supreme Commander showed the "end" of the Infinite War. Depending on which faction you played as, you seized control of the Black Sun superweapon, fired it, and won the war for your side. But if you stayed and watched the end of the credits, Supreme Commander hinted at something else. A rift opened, unleashing an alien horde known as the Seraphim. Forged Alliance picks up a couple of years later, with the surviving human factions trying to fend off extinction. You can play as any of the human factions in the six-mission campaign, and your choice will affect the dialogue that you hear, as well as some of the secondary missions, but the core objectives remain the same in all cases.

If the three single-player campaigns in Supreme Commander have a weakness, it's that each one ramps up slowly. The first mission gives you access to the most basic of units and buildings, then each successive mission unlocks new toys with which you can play. But it isn't until the final mission that the game unlocks all of your units and buildings. By that point, there isn't a lot of opportunity to play with the really cool stuff, like mighty experimental units, which are gigantic war machines that can turn the tide of battle. Sure, you can always play a skirmish or multiplayer game and get access to everything, but the single-player story always feels a bit lacking in that regard.

That problem is solved with Forged Alliance, which assumes that you've played through Supreme Commander and are ready to remove the training wheels. Each of Forged Alliance's six missions gives you access to almost everything from the get-go, with a handful of new units introduced during the course of the campaign. There's no ramp-up here because each battle is far bigger than anything seen in the original game. The warfare is much more epic and the battles are that much fiercer. You'll finally be able to unleash navies, air forces, and armies on huge maps. Opponents will throw masses of advanced and experimental units at you, which you'll need to respond to in kind. The average mission will take at least an hour and a half or so, although some will take longer. There's a nice variety of missions, including a large, naval battle set amid frigid seas; a desperate last stand against overwhelming odds; and a struggle among three sizeable foes.

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