It's not a pleasant feeling to have your own backside handed to you on a silver platter, when that once smug grimace is wiped clean off your face after what you thought was a glorious unstoppable army, so powerful that surely there was absolutely no possibility of its defeat, is handed back to you in a piles of twisted burning metal as the computer AI casually asks "Is this yours?" and then promptly proceeds to plunge its own gloriously unstoppable army into that rather large base of yours, trampling through the monuments of your success unopposed. The hours go up in smoke as your enemy's triumphant march lays waste to everything you built. Not pleasant, but still strangely quite an impressive sight to bear witness to.

Supreme Commander isn't a conventional strategy game, as conventional strategy games are a predictable sort; they shuttle you around small sandbox maps with samey objectives to complete while pitting you against rather unspectacular AI opposition who don't often put up much of a fight. SC differs from this preset - and not just in the smarts of its computer controlled adversaries; this is a game that's out to challenge what it is to be a strategy game, and one with very grand ideas about how you should be fighting wars.

SC has recognisable ambitions, as it's a game with a rich heritage, being the spiritual successor to the ten-year-old Total Annihilation, a game that itself strived for the same goals that SC now sets its sights upon. It was a game quite ahead of its time, using a scale that few games managed to emulate at the time and only a few now are beginning to match. However, while it was a game that acquired a great amount of critical acclaim, a less than spectacular sequel and the downfall of developers Cavedog saw it falling into relative obscurity beyond its dedicated fan base. It wasn't a game easily forgotten by those who came to love it, or by its creator Chris Taylor, who is the driving force behind this long awaited and unofficial follow up.

Similarities between the two games are more than a little obvious, but the differences are equally as noticeable. TA was a game famed more for its virtual war than for the story that was cobbled together and dropped in to string the game together, so in an attempt to address this, SC comes packed with its own grand space opera. It's a tale that takes place in a distant future where, in time honoured tradition, humanity is caught in a long bloody war with itself, splitting into three factions that are hell bent on annihilating one another.

The staunch United Earth Federation (UEF) are the most easily recognisable; human through and through, the UEF were once responsible for colonising all of known space with their massive galactic empire, before they got a little too big for their own boots and things began to fall apart. Now they seek to reclaim that once glorious empire by building a giant cannon that will allow them to destroy entire planets. The Cybran Nations on the other hand have different goals; half-machine and half-human, they were once slaves to humans but now seek to isolate themselves from the watchful eyes of their enemies by spreading a nasty computer virus through the massive Quantum Gateway Network, the means that allows deep space travel. The Aeon Illuminate are religions zealots who are using the highly advanced technology of a long dead alien civilisation, and they have absolutely no qualms about using force to convert people to "The Way", the religion they follow.

It's all pure sci-fi nonsense, told primarily through a succession of pre-mission briefing screens in which your illustrious leaders shout, moan and very rarely thank your efforts to lead them to victory. However, there has at least been some attempt to avoid the usual plot pitfalls that so many strategy games tend to fall into, as none of the factions are conveniently painted as black or white - they are each as guilty at committing atrocities and are all in danger of annihilation, so choosing who ultimately wins is simply a case of deciding who you think deserves it the most.

Supreme Commander's three armies are uniquely diverse in both they way they look and the types of technology they employ, but despite the visual differences, one common and very important unit, the Commander, is what binds each one. The Commander is the only living unit in the entire game, a giant lumbering metallic behemoth that houses its living operator inside. Commanders form the basis for every army and for many of the levels it's also the only unit you begin with, teleporting alone onto whatever planet you've been sent to conquer. The Commander can use his many abilities to raise the first production facilities, help assist in the construction of new units and is more than capable of fending off attacks from nosey enemy scouts, although it pays to keep your commander as far away from incidents such as that as is possible.

There's a reason for this, because the Commander isn't just an integral part of your army; he's the singular most important unit in the entire game - mission critical, in fact. Success always hinges on the destruction of the enemy commander; conversely, the loss of your own always results in instant mission failure. Just a quick word on exploding commanders; they don't go down quietly, and when destroyed they do tend to go out in a nuclear sized mushroom cloud that destroys everything in its path. Veteran Total Annihilation players will recognise the last ditch efforts used by players in the multiplayer mode by sending their commander as close to a rival's base as they can, in an attempt to take as many units with them as possible.

Although victory may hang in the balance, the commanders are not alone in their efforts to purge the galaxy of their troublesome enemies - it's safe to say that they're in quite good company, with a roster of units so vast that it's almost intimidating. It's with these units you start to gain some sense of the scale this game is aiming for. If you can think of it, chances are you can command it; tanks, mobile artillery, cruisers, submarines, fighter aircraft, bombers - this is one of the few strategy games where sea and air based units play as important a role as those on the land.

As if that wasn't enough, all of these unit types are one mere step on a huge technology ladder. It begins relatively slowly with the early Tech Phase 1, where weapons and buildings are the most cost efficient and consume the least power but are often too weak to afford you any significant amount of protection in the long haul. They're enough to get you on your feet, but not reliable in sustained encounters. Head to Tech Phase 2 and you are in the mid range territory, where resource gathering facilities are more efficient and vehicles are twice as powerful as those in Tech Phase 1.

Reach Tech Phase 3 and you'll hit the elite; buildings and units in this particular brand of technology aren't as numerous but are the most powerful technology you'll come to build. Units in particular are at their strongest in this phase, be it the utterly devastating effects of the artillery that shakes the screen wherever its shell lands while leaving behind small craters, to the awesome size of the battleships, one of the largest units in the game - so big that its turrets are about the same size as a tank! Although climbing through each tech phase may be quite easy, the cost incurred for each tech increases as you climb the ladder.

But just when you think you've reached the cusp of what Supreme Commander's massive list of units can reach, you'll discover the fourth Experimental Phase. This is the end of the technology tree, featuring the very best of what you can construct - it's here that you gain access to units so awesome in size and power that when used correctly they can swing an entire battle into your favour. However, these are not units that come cheap, costing as much in time (some take an hour to build) as they do in resources.

Each army has three unique experimental units. Picking just one as an example, the UEF "Fatboy" (I honestly don't make these names up) is a colossal mobile tank factory that can traverse the deeps of the ocean and contains so many mounted turrets that it can level entire bases to their foundations long before it reaches its borders, all the while rolling out its own army of tanks as it slowly crawls across the map. The Cybran "Monkeylord" on the other hand is a more direct unit, a giant six-legged insectoid machine that carries a huge laser spewing weapon on its back, which sweeps across the ground like a giant flamethrower, killing anything caught in its way. I've not even made mention of the huge UFO that launches its own personal air squadron, or the huge underwater aircraft carrier, or the "Iron Man" walking humanoid machine that shoots lasers from its eyes - all great fun to use, but also extremely costly.

Like any other strategy game, resources are the core to any successful empire builder. Here however they have been stripped of their monotony; there are only two resources to worry about - metal and power - both of which are renewable, so as long as you have the facilities needed to gather the two, you'll very rarely get to a stage where you find yourself interrupted due to a resource crisis. This is a good thing too, as Supreme Commander is a game dominated by war that's fought on a scale like no other.

Progress is something of an unpredictable beast in Supreme Commander, as early objectives hide the true extent to the real mission you're on, because their completion always reveals new objectives and expands the map beyond the borders you've just been fighting within. To help you grasp the size of each map - and they can be stupendously large - you get the rather nifty command map. This is not, as you might imagine, a separate viewing map for you to look at, but rather an extension of the battlefield you fight upon. Pull the mouse wheel back and the screen gradually zooms out; soon landmasses become peninsulas, continents crop into view separated by vast oceans, then continue to zoom out and you get a complete overview of the entire map - every river, canyon and mountain are all visible, while every single unit and building is represented by small icons.

This becomes an important tool when fighting off the marauding hordes of enemy armies, because due to the scale on which battles are fought, you really will need to keep an eye on everything. The maps are such a size that protecting your own borders can become a bit of a struggle; the AI in particular is relentless in its pursuit to annihilate you, constantly adapting to your strategies and seeking out weak spots to exploit. I had one level almost grind to a halt when one section of my base that I stupidly left unguarded came under severe attack - waves of gunships poured through this gap in my defences and ground my production to a halt while systematically destroying many of my buildings.

The fact that the game also simulates its world can also greatly impede progress - this is a game where tank shells can bust apart four or five units that have been clumped together and bullets don't flow in a predetermined path, meaning that any projectile shot from a weapon can fall wherever gravity tells it to. Supreme Commander can be an extremely difficult game at times, and I lost count of the number of occasions where an army I had spent the last hour building was torn to shreds when I eventually met up with the enemy's defences, then had to sit back and watch as their weapons tore through my units with such an ease that my army was utterly defeated within minutes.

Without doubt this is a game that'll test the skills of even the sturdiest of strategy gaming fanatics, especially when the later missions of the campaign come into play and you have the added threat of nuclear warfare to contend with. It's also a very demanding game, whose system requirements are as unforgiving on your computer as the enemy AI is to upon you. Developed for dual core processors, there are occasions where battles in SC can get so intense that the action grinds to a halt. For all its merits at producing such awe inspiring vistas for you to fight across, it can be difficult to appreciate such scale with such performance hits.

Of course, how these things determine whether or not you feel the game is worth investing in will depend on how willing you are to overlook such problems; the game is far from unplayable and with the right amount of tweaking with the options, large battles can work marginally well with less in-tuned systems, as long as you're prepared to do without what limited graphical niceties the game had to begin with.

Supreme Commander is a colossal giant on the strategy gaming scene; there are few games that have managed to provide war on a scale such as that witnessed here. It's not a game for the faint of heart though; eschewing challenges that will keep hardened genre fans more than occupied for a long while to come, this isn't a game that's going to welcome newcomers to the world of RTS. Not that easing new players into the genre seems to have been its intent though, as this is a game geared towards those who crave a challenge, and in that regard there are very few titles that can match the aptly named Supreme Commander.

Reviewed by Kieron Giacopazzi for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).