Supreme Ruler 2010 - PC Game Reviews


	Platform PC Genre Strategy Publisher Strategy First Developer Battlegoat Studios ESRB E (Everyone) Released Q2 2005

- Will appeal to the hard-core real-time strategy gamers - A very good premise of a “future” world where even the states of the “United” States are now independent entities - Has online play – if you can connect to a server

- Requires you to spend a week reading the manual to understand what to do - Graphics are old-school RTS - Hard to understand exactly who’s winning during battles

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Supreme Ruler 2010

Score: 6.0 / 10

There are 151 pages in the Supreme Ruler 2010 game manual, 152 if you include the back page with a list of 68 hot keys. Topics such as Surplus Deficit/ Projections, Tax Adjustments, Trade Balance and Commodity Graphs are examined in detail. It gets to the point that you think you’re studying for a college-level economics or poli-sci test instead of readying to play a game. I mean, this is supposed to be a real-time strategy game in the tradition of SimCity, Civilization and a dash of Command & Conquer for some military spice. But instead, you’re left with a game that requires a week’s worth of reading a huge manual before you’ll even feel comfortable to sit in front of your PC and play Supreme Ruler 2010.

If you finally get to that point where you’ve extensively memorized the manual (and honestly, only the hard-core of the hard-core RTS gamers will be willing to invest that amount of study dedication to prep to play a game), Supreme Ruler 2010 has some great ideas at work under the simplistic (but still cumbersome) graphical interface, but in the end it feels too much like work and not enough like a game.

Supreme Ruler 2010 features a great concept. It’s the near future, and the world is rife with turmoil, the United Nations broken into a thousand shards of failed diplomacy and the World Market now the dominating political culture. Not only are countries around the globe embroiled in a power struggle, but the “states” of the United States are no longer a single entity, reverting to the Civil War state of affairs, where the country had divisive and splintered factions. This sure plays for great political drama that creates a rewardingly intriguing background to Supreme Ruler 2010’s gameplay. Too bad that it literally could take a week’s worth of reading the game manual to actually figure out how to play it.

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Supreme Ruler 2010 is shackled with an overwhelming need to memorize the game manual cover-to-cover. On top of that, when you finally do get a slight grasp of what you’re doing, there’s simply too much resource management and hard-to-comprehend economic activities to monitor. Supreme Ruler 2010 seems at times to be not a game, but a real chore.

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The gameplay plays along the lines of almost any global domination-based RTS, such as Civilization or Age of Empires. The object is to complete specific objectives while keeping close tabs on the constant barrage of e-mails you’ll get from your Ministers, who are trying the diplomatic approach to resolving your “disagreements” with neighboring states or countries on who really owns what plot of real estate on the map.

There are a few different single-player modes to entertain the owners of economic Master’s degrees who are insane enough to play Supreme Ruler 2010: There’s the Scenario mode, scenarios with regional missions involving countries; Campaign mode, featuring longer versions of Scenario mode; and Mission mode, detailed objective-based undertakings with usually a specific goal in mind such as Capture Taiwan , Kansas versus NW, and Paris Attacks. There is also a multiplayer mode, but good luck trying to find a game; I couldn’t ever get connected to play online.

Your biggest difficulty will be trying to navigate the confusing in-game menu and effectively run your military and other resources with enough competency to win the objective or battle at hand. One of the most frustrating aspects during warfare-based objectives or missions is figuring out who is winning or who has the upper hand in a particular skirmish. You will see a lot of gunfire back and forth, but without a clearly defined color scheme to each side or something that really differentiates one side of the battle from another (no Blues or Grays here) good luck deciphering who is winning. Graphically, the game is not up to today’s PC standards, and that is another reason it’s hard to figure out what’s really going on during gameplay sequences. Visually, a plain, obviously dated graphics engine is behind Supreme Ruler 2010.

I honestly can’t see many “casual” gamers that would be drawn to Supreme Ruler 2010. This is a game that requires so much studying and preparation, that only those hard-core RTS gamers that really enjoyed SimCity or Civilization may want to give this everybody-wants-to-rule-the-world strategy game a try.

- Lee Cieniawa

lcieniawa@armchairempire.com

(September 29, 2005)