Supreme Commander Forged Alliance review for the PC

You'd be forgiven for mistaking Supreme Commander Forged Alliance, coming as it does less than a year after the last outing, for an expansion to the real-time strategy behemoth. However, Forged Alliance is designed to stand alone, and be played as a game in its own right. The fast and furious gameplay is exactly what you'd expect and more, and there's certainly plenty for confirmed Supreme Commander fans to get their teeth into, but is it too difficult for newcomers to the game to get the hang of without tackling its predecessor first? Expansion or standalone - find out in our Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance review now!
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Supreme Commander Forged Alliance review for the PC
Well, it's been nine months. That's surely long enough to recover from the beating Supreme Commander handed to you back in February. Hope you've been training in the meantime. Command & Conquer 3, Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts and World in Conflict, you say? Bum fights. Mere bantams compared to this RTS heavyweight. And, much like being repeatedly punched in the face by a large man, standalone expansion pack Forged Alliance is often more about surviving against impossible odds than it is about having fun. This is not an ignoble thing for it to be. It's just that there's only so many people who enjoy brutal punishment.

Before we go into Forged Alliance's sadism, here's a quick run down on what's different to its criticallyacclaimed parent game. Alongside a bunch of new units and balance changes, there's a new playable faction. The alien Seraphim add a little more variety, but this RTS's stern focus on symmetry and absolute balance means the differences to the three existing races are primarily cosmetic until you hit the really big stuff at the top of the tech tree. They're a little flashier than the others, but they do nothing to give any sense of playing an especially different game. Much more immediate is an overhauled interface. It shouldn't matter as much as it does, and it could easily have been shoved into a patch, but in a game in which seeing the bigger picture (and the 2000 warring robots within it) is essential, no longer having half the screen clouded over with Windows 95-type icons makes for a more elegant, fluid game.