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Starcraft II Review – “What a Rush”

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StarCraft II - Review

There was a time I was unstoppable. My tiny sprites would be feared in any RTS server, purging the other teams and painting the map my colour. But I took a week off – now whenever I get into a match, take a few seconds to decide what units to start building and start to formulate a battle plan – BAM – Zerg rushed. Again. Lasting 3 minutes at most, I’m getting caned but I’m loving every second of it.

This is StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, arguably the most awaited niche market game for the last 12 years. It’s finally installed and I’m ready to go. Or so I thought: sign in using my Battle.net account? I was never told I needed a Battle.net account. Begrudgingly, I close the game and get onto the Battle.net website to sign up; 20 minutes and 2 restarts later, I’m on the account management screen. I understand that in this day and age, with both the current economic climate and the number of people who refuse to pay for games on the rise, you need to protect yourselves from pirates; I do. But I really must applaud you Blizzard: I haven’t seen a DRM system as bad as this since Games for Windows bloody Live! I’m being punished - punished for owning a legal copy of the game and yet again I’m being bullied into logging onto yet another “friends” system. I have never met these people, they aren’t my friends, they are “people who play video games I play, with whom I had a conversation once, so I might want to play with them again to have a similarly droll conversation”. I’m moaning, don’t get me wrong, the system isn’t totally useless; with your personal login for the game you can be at any PC with StarCraft II installed and you can access your campaign and your achievements. It’s all saved to ‘the cloud’ – that is what I want from a system that forces me to log in to play a game. Anyway, I’ve finally got my game verified (it’s been installed for well over an hour now, the email verification system was a nightmare with my emails being forwarded to my new account) and I’m ready to play.

How does he smoke in that helmet?

Story

Right. You have to know the plot of the original StarCraft to have even a hope of understanding what’s going on here. Helpfully as you install StarCraft II the installer has a little natter explaining what the Hell happened and why you should care. I’ll try and sum it up for you in as few words as I can. The humans (Terrans) are fighting amongst themselves; there’s this race called the Zerg who are basically steroid'ed up space-dinosaurs who want to eat everything. They infect a Terran base and a charming gentleman by the name Jim Raynor (remember that name) destroys the base to save the entire Terran populace. Here’s the kicker: that base was owned by the Confederacy (a faction of Terrans). But it’s revealed that they knew about the Zerg issue all along and didn’t tell anyone. How polite. One of Jim Raynor’s buddies Kerrigan leads a Terran colony to rebel against the Confederacy, killing one of its leaders. This really gets the Confederacy’s attention, and prompts an attack on the rebels, leading to the use of a homing beacon to trick the Zerg into attacking the enemies of the Confederacy. This works fine until the Zerg decide to eat everything else as well. Here’s where it gets fun; there’s this third race, the Protoss who basically stir everything up, creating a fighting three-way. Mengsk (one of the Terrans), names himself Emperor of all Terran colonies. We find out Kerrigan, who got Zerg rushed earlier, is no longer Kerrigan but a Zerg agent, and now she’s all mad. Some stuff happens that fanboys find very interesting but isn’t key to the plot; we then find out that the Zerg and Protoss were created by another race: the Xel’Naga. The Zerg team leader Overmind wants to merge the two races for some reason. Mengsk is being a spacejerk, so the other Terran faction go after him and his “Dominion”. It all gets very confusing so here are the key points; Raynor decides to go after Mengsk. Kerrigan is now VERY evil.  And the Protoss leader sacrifices himself to destroy the Zerg Overmind.

StarCraft II’s campaign starts 4 years after the Brood War (covered in StarCraft’s expansion pack “StarCraft: Brood War”). The Zerg have supposedly disappeared, meaning the charming Protoss have stopped messing with things and have laid back a bit. Jim Raynor has formed a revolutionary army – Raynor’s Raiders - to overthrow the Dominion and Emperor Mengsk. To combat this Mengsk has “squandered trillions” attempting to give Raynor the image of a terrorist, as opposed to a freedom fighter. We play as Jimmy boy; the long haired, rugged looking gent from the original, who starts the initial cutscene by drinking heavily and shooting a TV. What a guy.

All the girls go for a TV-shooting madman.

Mengsk holds a press conference, provoking Raynor to leading his Rebels to liberate the populace of Mar Sara. When Raynor goes back to the bar his friend Tychus Findlay saunters in, claiming to have escaped prison whilst serving sentence for a crime Raynor committed. Tychus suggests that Raynor builds funds for his liberation army by collecting Xel’Naga artifacts for a scientific organization, by the name of the Moebius Foundation. Raynor takes Tychus up on the suggestion and the Rebels swipe an artefact piece from the Dominion at a Mar Sara base.

Suprise, surprise as our guys are getting ready to leave, the Zerg show up; throwing a massive space-reptilian spanner in the works. Just like in the original StarCraft, Raynor and his Rebels have to stand their ground until Raynor’s flagship turns up, with Horner at the helm. At this point Horner tells us that the Zerg have starting eating their way across all Terran homeworlds, and the Dominion have scarpered to defend their core worlds; leaving the outer colonies to bite the dust. All this injustice is far too much for a rugged protagonist to handle, so Raynor and his boys (and girls) run around saving everyone.

Gameplay

If you’re looking for something mind-blowingly new for the RTS genre you’re in the wrong place. The gameplay is a carbon copy of other big titles within the field (i.e .left click select, right click pwn),  but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s a reason developers haven’t changed the gameplay: it’s perfect - common sense controls, that anyone remotely interested in this game will already know, love and have mastered. The difficulty curve is similarly what you’d expect, the first mission you are given troops, no base building and no resources to juggle; it’s just a simple select all and attack move to final base. This really helps ease the player into the shiny new StarCraft universe. As you progress through the missions, you slowly get access to more buildings and units, until the endgame; when you will be furiously clicking and scrolling around the map with more simultaneous battles going on than is humanly possible to comprehend whilst you make the crucial nail-biting decision – “do I build 6 of these units and defend my base, or can I afford to wait 5 minutes, either watching my base go to Hell in high heels or hopefully just sacrificing a few buildings and building the game winning super destructobot?”.

Although the HUD and controls are pretty much what you’d expect from an RTS, the menu between missions is most definitely not generic. Instead of the old fashioned “Click here to do next mission, click here for information and click here to save and go outside where the AI can’t thrash you” initially, there’s a bizarre adventure game styley room in a bar where you can watch the overzealous censored news, change the jukebox music, talk to your companion or select the afore mentioned key activities. But a few missions in, you end up on a spaceship; where you can visit the armoury, the lab and the bridge, as well the cantina. It seems like Blizzard wanted to recreate the Normandy scenes from the Mass Effect series, but it just doesn’t cut it. The locations feel strained, like they’re trying too hard to give the game depth it just doesn’t have. Personally I am undecided on whether this is a good thing or not; it’s a pleasant change, clearly Blizzard want to show us how much effort they’ve put into every aspect of this game - but you can’t help but think that maybe if they’d given us a generic menu and put that time and effort into the actual game, could we have had a longer campaign?

That is one impressive codpiece Tychus.

But, enough, who actually plays StarCraft for the single player? The reason StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty has been so looked forward to, is the cult following the original had. The evidence speaks for itself; 12 years on and you can still find a multiplayer game for any needs. In this shiny new StarCraft there’s 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4 and FFA – and a whole league system, matching similarly skilled opponents so a first time gamer won’t be dropped into a match versus a hardened veteran. It’s safe to say that the multiplayer we’re experiencing now will be improved, you can bet the community will be pumping out hundreds of custom maps for people to play within a few months of release – this is plain to see from previous Blizzard games. However, if you do play online I cannot emphasise the importance of the “practice grounds”; it just holds your hand through those initial steps on special maps, with a slower gameplay, to make you comfortable before hitting a real 1v1. I skipped that and have had my base destroyed by a single marine more times than I care to mention. This is where we get into it properly; this is what StarCraft is about; the brutal and unforgiving gameplay. You will make mistakes; those mistakes will cost you the match but next game you’ll do it a little different, next game you’ll last a little longer, then a little longer after that until eventually you’ll be playing like the best of them.

With all the guns and booze coupled with the voice acting you’d think Mar Sara was Texas

Graphics

This is what I want from a game. Exactly what I want. When you’re in a match the units, buildings and terrain are all in decent detail, you can clearly see what building is what, whom it belongs to and who is attacking it. Thankfully the graphics have been done as more of an incremental update than a focused aspect, which gives the game much more depth and a longer campaign than would have been achieved if the developers had focused on a graphics overhaul. The graphics aren’t up there with some of the current top end games, but that doesn’t matter because everything is superbly clear. There is no lag, everything runs smoothly and it’s amazing: full marks here Blizzard. The UI when you’re not in a match is also pretty damn cool; fancy, but not so much that you can’t understand what’s going on. Everything is clearly laid out and makes sense. I wish more games would have this: clear, good looking graphics that are designed to allow you to play without it jumping every other second as opposed to graphics that look better than real life and destroy your graphics card. It's what we need, more games to start looking at a real balance between functionality and looks - I hope StarCraft II starts a trend that more PC games will follow.

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Details

Category: Real Time Strategy
Age: 16 Years and above
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment

Good Crafting...

  • The good-looking graphics that don’t strain your system.
  • The perfect online matchmaking system.
  • The well written plot that unlike most games gives them the depth to let you grow attached to characters - making you feel they actually matter.

Hard Graft

  • The limited units and buildings at the start of the campaign – once you’re a good five or six missions in you still don’t have half the things that I feel you’re ready to work with.
  • At some points during the campaign the missions feel strained – like the developers were running out of ideas.
  • 12 years?!? Really?!?

Overall then

StarCraft II:Wings of Liberty is everything you want in an RTS; the units all complement each other, none of the races are overpowered and the resource system works really well. It’s definitely worth a buy. It isn’t as groundbreaking as the original, but it does stick to the winning formula. Blizzard didn’t mess around to find something edgy or new, they know what works and here is the result – a cracking game.

Written & Reviewed by Alex Johnson

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