At first this game is kinda fun, you can collect resources and build units and attack. The enemy is constanly harassing you but you can defend ok. Once you get to the later missions, though... you have missions where you start out with almost no resources, and Water is the only one you need for money. (The green resource is ONLY used to increase the power coming from your generators and nothing else... ) Unfortunely, they put the water far away from your base, AND you have to find it first... very dumb mechanic. All while the enemy starts out with fully fledged bases and units all over the map with resources to gather (usually from 2 or more Water spots). Mission 9 is a clear example (Freedom Gaurd), where I just stopped playing. Fortunately, there's a "cheat" where you can find the file "SHELLCFG.H" in ".../Dark Reign/dark/shell" (Open up in Notepad) and change the number after "#define BTN_MISSION_COEFFICIENT" from 150 to 157... and you can skip these stupid missions. The game doesn't save your mission progress. If you beat Mission 3, as an example, and come back to the game, the game will start you off at Mission 1 again. The only way to get around this is with a save file, and save right before you beat the mission. Dumb. (Or us the cheat mentioned earlier (which is why I use it). All in all, got it on sale, played the missions that were fun, and skipped the bad ones. Final note, every unit in this game is very squishy (they all die in 5 hits or less)... the best bet is to build a bunch of cheap units and swarm the enemy in numbers... especially at first.
Whatever you do, do not compare this to Supreme Commander (a game later made by Cavedog Entertainment and Successor to this game). First off, the biggest bonus, for those who played this game when it first came out (the only player base I'm guessing), is that this GOG version WORKS! Not one crash at all, even when I minimize the game (which happens a lot with older games). Fun back in the day and fun still to play. But, the controls are bad compared to modern day RTS. - No double click to select all units of one type. - Using the arrow keys to move the screen around instead of WSAD. - If you use the minimap you have to "right click" to go to that part of map, but left click does every other order/selection. - Units do not auto attack enemy buildings, you have to manually attack every one. - Enemy buildings diseappear from the map unless you have them in your immediate LOS (Line of Sight), even after you've discovered them out of the FOW (Fog of War). - Issuing multiple orders ONLY works on your commander/engineers. - You have to "left click" to assign orders instead of "right click" in modern RTS (way better). - No "attack" move (although, in this game, all moves are "attack" moves (aka "A-moves"). Other than that, Great game for its time! 5/5.
