Varaxis

This is a significant upgrade to the SupCom engine, making everything appear much more polished and smoother, especially with fog of war. Along with balance changes and new units, it's like a whole new game, rather than an expansion. My favorite part of this game is how it offers a mesmerising view of a futuristic battlefield. How it allows you to zoom up, watch individual parts of an unit move and fire true projectiles. That might not seem to be not that special, but the level of amusement I get when I see projectiles hit things they're not supposed to hit is goofy high. I can spend hours zoomed in just to watch the animations of units, even small things like energy storage growing taller as more energy is stored, and how engineers tilt their wheels to float on the water. I wish every game had strategic zoom like this game, with such polished visuals. The user interface is still rather basic, but much improved over the original, giving you much more space to see the battlefield. It requires 3rd party add-ons (UI mods) to allow things such as keybind remapping, to display health bars all the time, managing templates easier, and upgrade helpers. I highly recommend at least getting GAZ_UI (I used version 6.1). I had to adjust my build order with the changes that took place, such as starting with a factory first. It wasn't until FA that I seriously started to look at deciphering all the + and - numbers on everything, and learning how to balance energy income with mass income, depending on what I wanted to build. A lot of reading tooltips, looking at unit stats in the unit database web page, and a bit of math helped me out, which is akin to doing spreadsheets. This game seems to love Intel processors, or those with great "single-thread" performance. Playing on a laptop or AMD CPU will result in some slow-mo action before the end. Even if you have a good CPU, playing in a game with another with a slow CPU can make it agonizingly slow for you, especially if you're used to it being faster. The game doesn't run smoothly at full speed if there's someone else in your game with a poor or unreliable connection as well. I felt like I couldn't play big 8 player games with air battles and 1000 unit cap, until I got my PC upgraded (from AMD X3 720 to i2600k). The gameplay itself is a handful. It's a challenge to multi-task. The objective is simple, to destroy the enemy commander, but achieving it is another story. You should manage to progress your economy, never settling with a certain amount as "enough", and considering how there's 3 tech levels of it and the hugeness of how maps are, you quickly find out how difficult it is to keep track of anything spread out. Staying compact will allow you to progress through tech at a manageable pace, but this is not an ideal way to achieve victory. Until you get used to things, to the point they become subconscious actions, your strategies will be extremely limited. I resorted to gambling with basic strategies, such as building up dozens of tanks, outnumbering the enemy, and using an upgraded commander to spearhead the assault, looking to surround the enemy commander. At first it was successful, but as maps get bigger and enemy teams get more members, this becomes less effective. Using a dozen tech 2 bombers or gunships to just simply fly in and bomb the enemy commander was a gamble that was easily countered by a shield and a few flak units. Once I got the hang of quickly upgrade my mass, I tried getting out an experimental as quickly as possible, but this strat could be beaten by a zerg rush. Sneaking a T3 commander with a transport as soon as possible was a huge gamble, but seemingly was the only strat that worked if I could land it where I wanted, without endless practice in other parts of the game. Multiplayer is still barely alive. I was able to register my product serial on Steam to play there, but a competing 3rd party lobby seems to be **** players away with its advertising. If you choose to play multiplayer on that other lobby, "FAF", I hope you have thick skin and have great luck! I'd describe it as being an active volcano. Be extra cautious and watch out for eruptions. Go in with low expectations, else you may be disappointed, as their advertisements are clearly biased. They lose as many users as they get new ones, due to how toxic and unwelcoming they can be to some, especially those who go in expecting too much. Stick it out and endure the frustration and you'll be able to play one of the most noteworthy RTS games with some actual players. After playing this, I haven't found another RTS that has impressed me enough. SupCom2 was okay for a short while, fixing some issues I had with Forged Alliance, but was not close to being a FA killer, since it just didn't have the same scale and felt cheapened overall, such as with the cheesy sound effects (ex. commander explosion) and Aeon unit names that sounded cheap and unoriginal. I can't wait for a real update to SC:FA.

I felt immediately comfortable playing Hawken, since I like Tribes and Halo style play. The jumpjets and the amount of HP mechs have, takes the emphasis off of snap and reaction skills out and opens the door to tactical and strategic skills. You don't have to collect stronger weapons nor power-ups like armor, so skirmishes tend to be fair fights. The game modes are interesting, taking a game or two to learn the unfamiliar ones like Missile Assault and Siege, and are regularly played. There seems to be some personal matchmaking rating that matches you with those near your skill level, but for me it seemed to have cut down the # of available games down a lot. There doesn't seem to be too many online to find a decent game where one team doesn't outnumbers the other, I wind up having to go to another server, US East, to find them. Balanced games seem to be uncommon and leavers are not really punished in any way except for counting under their "Abandoned Games" stat figure. Unreal engine dodging in this game can be ridiculous with how some light mechs can do their dashes in the air with very short cooldown. Maps are few and the amount of cheap destructible stuff on many maps is a bit excessive. There are a few mechs that are too similar to others, creating a grind of an experience on them. The game's free to play, but they obviously are trying to make money. Every time you start up the game, you must stare at a sponsor billboard screen for 5 seconds, unable to skip or alt-tab to wait it out. The upgrades and unlocks in game are so numerous and expensive that you'd need to spend well over 100 hours to unlock them using credits earned from playing only. It took me on average 20 game wins to afford something, games which last 10-30 mins each. The game's plagued by some bugs, such as items getting planted/embedded into the ground making finding and aiming at them hard. You can get stuck on some things like under energy lifters, on trees, or whatever. There's also hackers that use aimbot and move speed enhancements ruining games. Overall, I do not regret uninstalling the game, though I did not regret the bit of fun I had playing it. I just wore through the fun of learning the mechanics of mastering weapons, aiming, dodging, flying and navigating through the map, and various game modes. It just eventually turned into a grind, a time sink, once I started focusing on the unlocks, instead of my performance. Friends moving on to other things didn't get me to move on, but I did play less and have less fun, and frustration with terrible team balance and hackers were the final straw to get me to kick this to the curb.

I'm not impressed. Just got done playing Darksiders 2 and playing this felt like a chore in comparison. Played Torchlight and Magicka before this and they were more interesting. Never really got into Elder Scrolls and haven't played the other Gothic games, so it could just be me and my personal standards/tastes. The pace in this is too slow. Ain't nobody got time fo dat.

Grinding is not fun. The cost of faster advancement is not cheap. You can easily spent more than $100 on this game. You will be cycled through a pattern of being frustratingly weak and slow, until you upgrade your tank fully. You can either then try to get your crew experience if you enjoy fighting in that tier and want to stick to a tank, or move on and restart a new cycle of frustration and upgrading. Those who upgraded or have paid, will enjoy destroying others in your helpless state... "zomg, I killed 5+ tanks! So epic!" I personally got fed up by Tier 3/4. I finally found a tank I liked, the German "Luchs", but the reward for the grind just wasn't very satisfying. Some have said that Tier 6 tank that my Luchs can research into, a VK2801 or something, was amazing, but I rather not play a game with so much grinding, unless it had a better social aspect. To say the least, I really like the music.

This game opened my eyes to the fun of creating sandbox style RTS with tons of units. This is responsible for many days of sleep deprivation, others mad that the phone line is tied up (dial-up), and excessive amount of money for fast PC to run it smoother. After some patches and new unit releases and ultimately when the Core Contingency expansion was released, all those issues in the past just became even more severe. That and hygiene and diet suffered--the house was being neglected and junk food became the primary choice of sustenance. No other game has done this to me. EverQuest comes close though. This led me to follow Chris Taylor to his other games, though SupCom FA is the only thing that has come close to recreating the experience of Total Annihilation. Got to love the old MPlayer crowd. TEN was cool for rankings, though I didn't do as well as I thought I should've (1900s). Heat was nice for casual games, but ELITE clan battles were pretty intense. Only remember Lazeroo and (can only think of a bear for some reason). I was always coming up with crafty stuff like Rapier rush comm snipes and was accused of cheating on more than one occasion. The truly good players focused on tactical micro such as early bombing runs on low resource maps like Coast to Coast. I always did well with macro, spamming the heck out of Hawks, Vamps, nukes, artillery, etc on a such a large scale... Ahh, memories.

I was bored of this after only a few hours. I admit I'm not much of a fan of simple games like this, though. It needs more depth. I'd be more interested if I saw more plane stats and could customize more.