4 / 10 is a fair rating for a game where you get a barebones strategy game with broken features, dumb units, buggy pathfinding and a braindead AI in a boring campaign.
The game has so many issues that it goes beyond the character limit when I tried to write them all down, even when trying to keep it as short as possible.
Major issues with the game:
Population: Each unit and structure4 / 10 is a fair rating for a game where you get a barebones strategy game with broken features, dumb units, buggy pathfinding and a braindead AI in a boring campaign.
The game has so many issues that it goes beyond the character limit when I tried to write them all down, even when trying to keep it as short as possible.
Major issues with the game:
Population: Each unit and structure costs 1 population of your population limit. This means the larger your base the fewer units you're able to build. There's no way to increase this without messing with the game itself. This also means that a high tech experimental unit, that can easily kill hundreds of tech 1 units, costs just 1 population, like each of the hundreds of attacking tech 1 units does.
Veterancy: The veterancy system is kill based. This punishes you for sending cheap, fast produced units that die easily towards the enemy. The game likes to show off with it's mass battles but that's entirely deceiving when realizing how the population and veterancy systems work. Only a fool would play that way.
Bugs: Pathfinding, audio, late game performance are the most important of many. The pathfinding bug will regularly cause one or more of your units to get stuck, even if there's nothing to get stuck on. It just happens. The audio issue seems to be entirely random, going from functional to nonfunctional, to functional again, with cause and fix yet to be determined. For all of those that had it it somehow magically fixed itself later on even though literally everything possible on their system and with the game (uncluding formatting, reinstall of Windows + the game) was tried to no avail. It just worked again at some point without any change of hard- or software. There are 2 types of the audio bug: #1 crashes your game after a few minutes in or may cause severe but short slowdowns, #2 just causes mission briefings to not load, in-mission dialogues to be without sound and unit-selection response sounds only playing once and then never again while all weapon sounds still work flawlessly and can happen while playing. The late game performance bug is due to memory leaks that never remove defeated AIs and units, causing the game to slow down massively the longer it runs and to eventually crash.
AI: It does not exist. It needs to be told what it's supposed to do, even what to build. It doesn't really react to anything happening. It's not fit for survival, as it even lacks a concept to protect and hide it's ACU, the core unit that it needs to protect as otherwise it loses the game once it's destroyed. The AI is a wild mix of all vision omnipresence cheating, knowing your weak spots without ever scouting properly, and some really stupid easily disposed of joke.
Futuristic: I expected this game to be about futuristic combat but this was also entirely deceiving as most units only have a single type of weapon and there are literally no intersting, clever weapon systems at work in the entire game. Everything is just pretty looking but totally dumbed down. In fact the UI isn't even build to support the usage of special unit abilities, like it's the case in other games and thus most units only have an off/on toggle for some energy draining abilities, like radar. Again it's just pew pew lazers and shields with a few hover units what's understood as futuristic combat.
Combat: The game lacks a concept to make certain units better vs specific targets they're meant to counter while weaker vs specific targets they're meant to be countered by entirely. This means a sniper bot deals the same damage vs a base building engineer as vs a tank, any structure, a battleship, shield etc. This turns the game away from actual strategy gameplay to unit values of production speed, production price (mass, energy), weapon range, DPS, damage per salvo and maybe whether it's single target damage or area damage that matter. But that you have a tank there that's supposed to be tanky isn't a concept the game grasps. Low tech units just get useless later on, which limits the actual amount of units that you can play with to a bit more than a hand full per faction plus their faction-specific experimentals.
Also despite being largely about construction there's no helpful construction grid and things can't be managed properly because of a lack of command options as well as UI features. If you're really unlucky an engineer that's ordered to construct on uneven ground will elevate all to the same height level when beginning to construct and thus ruin the entire build space around that area that's then no longer usable for construction by you. But I was told in the forums that this is not an issue because it happens only rarely, even if it mattered to me back then. It's fine... Uninstall and into the trash it goes. There's just much more that's unfun than fun inside. One of the most deceiving titles I've ever had to deal with. Absence of strategy, lack of gameplay. See youtube.… Expand
Supreme Commander: Forged AllianceYour Score0 out of 10User Score
