Starcraft 2 is the long-awaited sequel to Starcraft - the golden standard for Real-Time Strategy games for the past 10 years running. SC2 has huge expectations considering how wildly popular the first one was. How many games can boast being the 2nd biggest sport in a very populated country, and have it's own TV channel and arena for pro players to entertain vast audiences? Just one. Starcraft.
Gameplay: 10.0
Unique gameplay concepts - What drives the game, and what is it similar to?
We'll get the basic stuff out of the way for those of you that live under a rock or something. Starcraft 2 is a Real-Time Strategy game in which you're expected to build up both worker units and army units in order to eventually overwhelm your opponents. For every unit there is always a counter-unit, and for every strategy there is always a counter-strategy. The game usually comes down to who executes their strategy better. Skill level differences among the audience of players is vast, and understandably so.
Starcraft 1 and 2 both feature three different races - Terran, Protoss and Zerg. Each race has a different balance between their play-styles, mostly swinging between defensive and offensive capabilities. It seems every player that plays Starcraft adopts a race they call their main race, and they get good at that race and can play it very well against a multitude of different race and strategy combinations that their opponent might throw at them.
Honestly, it'd be pretty hard for them to make something disappointing. Starcraft 1 was legendary. It introduced levels of depth and versatility to a strategy game that nobody had ever seen, and very few even came close to mimicking. It stood on it's own as the king of RTS for a full decade, and rightfully so.
The reason Starcraft 1 was so popular and long-lasting is they designed so many different ways to play. Building placement, economy harassment, scouting, trickery and even micromanaging your big battles all fed into different strategies, so no one main strategy would win even most of the games. Starcraft has always been about adaptation and overcoming an opponent that is just as crafty as you are.
Starcraft 2 stuck to the mold. In many ways, it's a very similar game. But this is a rare game that actually paid attention to their pro players' style and built the game around the kinds of tactics the pro players would use, and made for a much deeper game.
Starcraft 2 brought back a majority of their lower-tier units, like marines and zerglings. Terrans are still pretty defensive, the Zerg are still pretty offensive, and the Protoss are still a more specialty/skill-driven race.
One of the biggest changes in the game was the Zerg's design. In the campaign of both SC1 and 2, they're seen as sort of a plague that spreads and takes over whatever it touches. Their buildings all spread and required "creep", which is this veiny substance that the Zerg lays on the ground. Most of the campaign missions, historically, have been about stopping the Zerg swarm from overtaking everything in the galaxy. They finally took that idea and transfused it into multiplayer, so that playing as the Zerg is a lot more about controlling as much of the map as possible, and your units gaining an advantage when they are on creep. Also, instead of mass-producing hatcheries as the Zerg, they completely changed their Queen unit to be a guardian of your base who can also generate extra larvae at your hatchery (larvae are required to build Zerg units) and create creep tumors, which are objects designed to spread your creep around the map and give you vision of wherever your creep extends to, generating map control and a more favorable place to fight for your units. A lot of other interesting changes for the Zerg took place, too, like mobile "static" defense units that you can move up as you spread your creep.
The biggest change for Protoss were the Warp Gates. Their Gateways still allow you to produce most of your ground units, but after some researching they can be turned into Warp Gates, which means instead of a unit queue, you warp a unit in at any pylon around the map (balanced by a cooldown rather than build times), making for a very mobile, map-controlling army that can be produced basically anywhere instead of just at your base.
Terrans are actually the most similar to Starcraft 1, and I think that's appropriate considering Terrans are the race everyone always played first in the campaign, and the race they play first in the campaign of Starcraft 2. Ironically, Terran is probably the most flexible race in the game, though, whereas in Starcraft 1 they were notably slow and defense-oriented.
A lot of the units in the game, however, were either replaced or re-designed to promote a wider array of strategies one could attempt. Almost every army unit in the game has a special ability or tech upgrade that will make them better than their original version, and a lot of the units are focused to take specific roles on the battlefield rather than a bunch of units just shooting at each other until one army is dead.
Their ability to craft maps that are fair and consistent (much unlike Starcraft 1) is very impressive to me. They have added new aspects to their maps to make the game more dynamic, such as high-yield mineral fields (more resources in less mining time), destructible rocks that will either block off mining points or entrances to your base, and watchtowers that give you huge amounts of vision surrounding the watchtower while only having to send 1 ground unit there to control it.
Pretty much every map that comes default in the game is used in competitive play. Each map has a particular strategy base but is also very dynamic. Brood Wars, it's predecessor, had terrible map design. They were wildly inconsistent and there was a huge library. In Starcraft 2, they had great focus on their map design and made them all play pretty dang well, yet still uniquely. Not only that, they constantly update their maps and when you select a map to play on, or when you're matched against a random opponent, those slight tweaks to the maps are automatically downloaded and included.
Starcraft 2 also has a much better campaign than the original. Their campaigns are diverse, they have a better ability to tell a story through dialogue and cut-scenes, and they are actually quite different from the standard gameplay path that Starcraft established.
I will say that while they thought outside the box on a lot of their campaign missions, some are just annoying. At least they were adventurous and started exporing the endless avenues in which this game could be played. Most of the missions are fun, but some of them are bad ideas that make the game less fun than normal. I would say most people that bought Starcraft 2 actually didn't bother to complete the campaign before they started multiplayer, or didn't bother to complete it at all.
As you play through the campaign, you earn different types of units to use throughout the remainder of the campaign, and almost every mission is meant to showcase the new unit you'll be unlocking. You can also use money and research that you obtained throughout the campaign to make particular units stronger, or gain new abilities that can make your gameplay experience more unique and diverse as opposed to blitzing through game after game of multiplayer where the units, settings and gameplay objectives are always the same. It's a nice change of pace.
Their campaigns are supposedly set up to play mainly as one race per game they will be releasing. This campaign focuses on Terran and showing off all of the units that they made for Terran that are both in multiplayer by default and not. You can also play some Protoss missions which show you most of the Protoss units, in order to teach you how to play. As far as I understand, there are no campaign missions in which you can control the Zerg, but an expansion should be coming out soon that is a Zerg-focused campaign.
The Starcraft 2 AI's are actually pretty good. They still don't play quite as a human would, and their decision-making is pretty linear, but they at least put a few judgment calls on the computer such as knowing when to back out of a battle. It's also funny that they programmed in the computer scouting with their workers to see what you're doing, even though I don't think it affects how they play (or at least I've never noticed). The Insane (hardest) AI's, without knowing some cheap strategy to beat them, are actually a ridiculous opponent. I was disappointed to learn that the Insane AI's get more resources when they harvest, though, giving you a handicap instead of a truly human-like opponent.
Sheesh, this is getting long already, but needs to be said - they definitely improved their user interface when it comes to starting standard matches. They have a ladder system wherein you basically press start, play a match against somebody that is near your skill level and duke it out. As you win or lose, your level of competition is either raised or lowered to keep the matches as fair as possible. I guess it's what people expect in games nowadays, but their improvement over the Starcraft 1 online interface is dramatic and it felt like it was worth mentioning, as in Starcraft 1 you had no idea what level of competition you'd be facing in any given game.
Starcraft 2 also has challenge modes that will train you to play like you see the pros play, and educate you on how to gain a tactical advantage against players around your same skill level. Couple that with tutorials, good AI and a great matching system, it's easy to get sucked into this game and want to get better.
Starcraft 1 lasted so long because of their map editor - you could turn Starcraft into a totally different game, and all avid Starcraft 1 fans know of a big library of custom games they played and liked back in the day. Starcraft 2 offers similar tools for creating your own maps and scenarios to play online as custom games, making the library of content for this game virtually endless.
Presentation: 9.0
Graphical and audio presentation (animation, texturing, overall look & artistic style)
Starcraft 2 in-game looks great. On it's highest settings, they have tons of unique death animations for each of their units depending on what killed them, and even actual physics that can be fun to look at when units get killed. Indications for important events are all easily seen and identified (think nuclear launches from SC1.. tracking them down was almost impossible). Even watching videos from the beta, you can see how much time they took making sure game-sensitive information was easy to spot and identify.
Starcraft 2's character models during cut-scenes, along with their animations and skinning are all either decent or somewhat lacking. They're not terrible but plenty of other games have much better-looking skinning in particular.
I would have also expected a little better sound effects and actually feel that Starcraft 1's audio is superior.
Theatrics: 7.5
Story, Dialogue, Cut-Scenes and Artistic Use of Camera
Their story throughout their campaign kind of seems to ramble, which tends to happen in an RTS. The main character is Jim Raynor, the leader of a rebel faction who are seeking to end an oppressive reign of terror. Yeah, the story's been done a whole bunch of times, and honestly it really doesn't seem all that epic or anything.
The dialogue is actually pretty cheesy at a number of points. Their cut-scenes and dialogue exchanges are about on par with a bad action movie. Very little important events seem to happen, either. Only a couple times throughout the campaign was I actually excited to see what was going to happen in the next cut-scene, amongst their several dozens.
It all seems pretty routine, and if even the best RTS in the world can't tell a very engaging story through their game, I don't know if we'll ever see one that is what I'd call "good".
Their voice acting is actually really good though, despite a lot of their characters either being cliche or not defined much at all.
Controls: 10.0
Ease of Use and Smoothness of Controls
Starcraft 2's controls are easily the best controls I've ever seen in an RTS.
The biggest hindrance in Starcraft 1 was controlling a large army of units. Micromanaging was cumbersome and commanding so many units at once was too large of a task. The ability to select an infinite number of units and command them as one group, as well as the ability to select any number of the same type of building and logically produce out of them makes it easy for novice players to play at a much higher level than they otherwise would.
The controls actually push this game's competitive aspect. Learning the game is easier and playing the game is easier. You can't ask for much more than that.
Also due to the controls being so smooth, the game plays ridiculously fast, obviously catering to the competitive aspect, once again.
Replay Value: 10.0
Total Gameplay Time versus Expected
Starcraft 2's campaign will probably provide 25 hours or so of gameplay, and most of the missions are pretty interesting. But if you like the game at all you'll have a hard time not playing deep into multiplayer, challenges and custom games. It's an addicting game - one of those where if you play and invest time into it, you'll catch yourself thinking about gameplay scenarios when your mind would otherwise be idle.
I'm not sure how appropriate this is to throw in a game review, but there are tons of channels around youtube that are broadcasts of pro Starcraft players that are tons of fun to watch. I've probably watched more Starcraft 2 than I've played, and that's because it's a fun game in so many different ways. Watching the top-tier players play and then emulating their strategies in your own games is very rewarding.
Fun: 10.0
What were the most and least fun parts of the game? Overall, how much fun is the game?
If you're a fan of RTS games at all, this is the modern-day holy grail of RTS. The game is fun in so many different ways and has such a broad appeal, it's hard to complain about it at all. Losing can obviously be frustrating but it's even more obvious that losing isn't due to the game being bad, it's just you being bad at the game, or your opponent being really good!
Anyway, gg. Change your motor oil every 3,000 miles. nr 20min.
My Overall Rating: 9.7
Complexity Level: Holy bwuh? The reason this game is the pinnacle of RPGs is because there are so many different levels of depth and strategy. Newer players would get absolutely abused in every way by veterans. It's a fast game, requires a ton of concentration, and even for somebody experienced in a wide array of video games, there's at least a couple-week period where they go from absolutely terrible at the game to somewhat competent. The best players in the world play at such an unfathomable level and know basically everything there is to know about the game, and even the highest of high-level competition is still evolving.
Gameplay: 10.0
Unique gameplay concepts - What drives the game, and what is it similar to?
We'll get the basic stuff out of the way for those of you that live under a rock or something. Starcraft 2 is a Real-Time Strategy game in which you're expected to build up both worker units and army units in order to eventually overwhelm your opponents. For every unit there is always a counter-unit, and for every strategy there is always a counter-strategy. The game usually comes down to who executes their strategy better. Skill level differences among the audience of players is vast, and understandably so.
Starcraft 1 and 2 both feature three different races - Terran, Protoss and Zerg. Each race has a different balance between their play-styles, mostly swinging between defensive and offensive capabilities. It seems every player that plays Starcraft adopts a race they call their main race, and they get good at that race and can play it very well against a multitude of different race and strategy combinations that their opponent might throw at them.
Honestly, it'd be pretty hard for them to make something disappointing. Starcraft 1 was legendary. It introduced levels of depth and versatility to a strategy game that nobody had ever seen, and very few even came close to mimicking. It stood on it's own as the king of RTS for a full decade, and rightfully so.
The reason Starcraft 1 was so popular and long-lasting is they designed so many different ways to play. Building placement, economy harassment, scouting, trickery and even micromanaging your big battles all fed into different strategies, so no one main strategy would win even most of the games. Starcraft has always been about adaptation and overcoming an opponent that is just as crafty as you are.
Starcraft 2 stuck to the mold. In many ways, it's a very similar game. But this is a rare game that actually paid attention to their pro players' style and built the game around the kinds of tactics the pro players would use, and made for a much deeper game.
Starcraft 2 brought back a majority of their lower-tier units, like marines and zerglings. Terrans are still pretty defensive, the Zerg are still pretty offensive, and the Protoss are still a more specialty/skill-driven race.
One of the biggest changes in the game was the Zerg's design. In the campaign of both SC1 and 2, they're seen as sort of a plague that spreads and takes over whatever it touches. Their buildings all spread and required "creep", which is this veiny substance that the Zerg lays on the ground. Most of the campaign missions, historically, have been about stopping the Zerg swarm from overtaking everything in the galaxy. They finally took that idea and transfused it into multiplayer, so that playing as the Zerg is a lot more about controlling as much of the map as possible, and your units gaining an advantage when they are on creep. Also, instead of mass-producing hatcheries as the Zerg, they completely changed their Queen unit to be a guardian of your base who can also generate extra larvae at your hatchery (larvae are required to build Zerg units) and create creep tumors, which are objects designed to spread your creep around the map and give you vision of wherever your creep extends to, generating map control and a more favorable place to fight for your units. A lot of other interesting changes for the Zerg took place, too, like mobile "static" defense units that you can move up as you spread your creep.
The biggest change for Protoss were the Warp Gates. Their Gateways still allow you to produce most of your ground units, but after some researching they can be turned into Warp Gates, which means instead of a unit queue, you warp a unit in at any pylon around the map (balanced by a cooldown rather than build times), making for a very mobile, map-controlling army that can be produced basically anywhere instead of just at your base.
Terrans are actually the most similar to Starcraft 1, and I think that's appropriate considering Terrans are the race everyone always played first in the campaign, and the race they play first in the campaign of Starcraft 2. Ironically, Terran is probably the most flexible race in the game, though, whereas in Starcraft 1 they were notably slow and defense-oriented.
A lot of the units in the game, however, were either replaced or re-designed to promote a wider array of strategies one could attempt. Almost every army unit in the game has a special ability or tech upgrade that will make them better than their original version, and a lot of the units are focused to take specific roles on the battlefield rather than a bunch of units just shooting at each other until one army is dead.
Their ability to craft maps that are fair and consistent (much unlike Starcraft 1) is very impressive to me. They have added new aspects to their maps to make the game more dynamic, such as high-yield mineral fields (more resources in less mining time), destructible rocks that will either block off mining points or entrances to your base, and watchtowers that give you huge amounts of vision surrounding the watchtower while only having to send 1 ground unit there to control it.
Pretty much every map that comes default in the game is used in competitive play. Each map has a particular strategy base but is also very dynamic. Brood Wars, it's predecessor, had terrible map design. They were wildly inconsistent and there was a huge library. In Starcraft 2, they had great focus on their map design and made them all play pretty dang well, yet still uniquely. Not only that, they constantly update their maps and when you select a map to play on, or when you're matched against a random opponent, those slight tweaks to the maps are automatically downloaded and included.
Starcraft 2 also has a much better campaign than the original. Their campaigns are diverse, they have a better ability to tell a story through dialogue and cut-scenes, and they are actually quite different from the standard gameplay path that Starcraft established.
I will say that while they thought outside the box on a lot of their campaign missions, some are just annoying. At least they were adventurous and started exporing the endless avenues in which this game could be played. Most of the missions are fun, but some of them are bad ideas that make the game less fun than normal. I would say most people that bought Starcraft 2 actually didn't bother to complete the campaign before they started multiplayer, or didn't bother to complete it at all.
As you play through the campaign, you earn different types of units to use throughout the remainder of the campaign, and almost every mission is meant to showcase the new unit you'll be unlocking. You can also use money and research that you obtained throughout the campaign to make particular units stronger, or gain new abilities that can make your gameplay experience more unique and diverse as opposed to blitzing through game after game of multiplayer where the units, settings and gameplay objectives are always the same. It's a nice change of pace.
Their campaigns are supposedly set up to play mainly as one race per game they will be releasing. This campaign focuses on Terran and showing off all of the units that they made for Terran that are both in multiplayer by default and not. You can also play some Protoss missions which show you most of the Protoss units, in order to teach you how to play. As far as I understand, there are no campaign missions in which you can control the Zerg, but an expansion should be coming out soon that is a Zerg-focused campaign.
The Starcraft 2 AI's are actually pretty good. They still don't play quite as a human would, and their decision-making is pretty linear, but they at least put a few judgment calls on the computer such as knowing when to back out of a battle. It's also funny that they programmed in the computer scouting with their workers to see what you're doing, even though I don't think it affects how they play (or at least I've never noticed). The Insane (hardest) AI's, without knowing some cheap strategy to beat them, are actually a ridiculous opponent. I was disappointed to learn that the Insane AI's get more resources when they harvest, though, giving you a handicap instead of a truly human-like opponent.
Sheesh, this is getting long already, but needs to be said - they definitely improved their user interface when it comes to starting standard matches. They have a ladder system wherein you basically press start, play a match against somebody that is near your skill level and duke it out. As you win or lose, your level of competition is either raised or lowered to keep the matches as fair as possible. I guess it's what people expect in games nowadays, but their improvement over the Starcraft 1 online interface is dramatic and it felt like it was worth mentioning, as in Starcraft 1 you had no idea what level of competition you'd be facing in any given game.
Starcraft 2 also has challenge modes that will train you to play like you see the pros play, and educate you on how to gain a tactical advantage against players around your same skill level. Couple that with tutorials, good AI and a great matching system, it's easy to get sucked into this game and want to get better.
Starcraft 1 lasted so long because of their map editor - you could turn Starcraft into a totally different game, and all avid Starcraft 1 fans know of a big library of custom games they played and liked back in the day. Starcraft 2 offers similar tools for creating your own maps and scenarios to play online as custom games, making the library of content for this game virtually endless.
Presentation: 9.0
Graphical and audio presentation (animation, texturing, overall look & artistic style)
Starcraft 2 in-game looks great. On it's highest settings, they have tons of unique death animations for each of their units depending on what killed them, and even actual physics that can be fun to look at when units get killed. Indications for important events are all easily seen and identified (think nuclear launches from SC1.. tracking them down was almost impossible). Even watching videos from the beta, you can see how much time they took making sure game-sensitive information was easy to spot and identify.
Starcraft 2's character models during cut-scenes, along with their animations and skinning are all either decent or somewhat lacking. They're not terrible but plenty of other games have much better-looking skinning in particular.
I would have also expected a little better sound effects and actually feel that Starcraft 1's audio is superior.
Theatrics: 7.5
Story, Dialogue, Cut-Scenes and Artistic Use of Camera
Their story throughout their campaign kind of seems to ramble, which tends to happen in an RTS. The main character is Jim Raynor, the leader of a rebel faction who are seeking to end an oppressive reign of terror. Yeah, the story's been done a whole bunch of times, and honestly it really doesn't seem all that epic or anything.
The dialogue is actually pretty cheesy at a number of points. Their cut-scenes and dialogue exchanges are about on par with a bad action movie. Very little important events seem to happen, either. Only a couple times throughout the campaign was I actually excited to see what was going to happen in the next cut-scene, amongst their several dozens.
It all seems pretty routine, and if even the best RTS in the world can't tell a very engaging story through their game, I don't know if we'll ever see one that is what I'd call "good".
Their voice acting is actually really good though, despite a lot of their characters either being cliche or not defined much at all.
Controls: 10.0
Ease of Use and Smoothness of Controls
Starcraft 2's controls are easily the best controls I've ever seen in an RTS.
The biggest hindrance in Starcraft 1 was controlling a large army of units. Micromanaging was cumbersome and commanding so many units at once was too large of a task. The ability to select an infinite number of units and command them as one group, as well as the ability to select any number of the same type of building and logically produce out of them makes it easy for novice players to play at a much higher level than they otherwise would.
The controls actually push this game's competitive aspect. Learning the game is easier and playing the game is easier. You can't ask for much more than that.
Also due to the controls being so smooth, the game plays ridiculously fast, obviously catering to the competitive aspect, once again.
Replay Value: 10.0
Total Gameplay Time versus Expected
Starcraft 2's campaign will probably provide 25 hours or so of gameplay, and most of the missions are pretty interesting. But if you like the game at all you'll have a hard time not playing deep into multiplayer, challenges and custom games. It's an addicting game - one of those where if you play and invest time into it, you'll catch yourself thinking about gameplay scenarios when your mind would otherwise be idle.
I'm not sure how appropriate this is to throw in a game review, but there are tons of channels around youtube that are broadcasts of pro Starcraft players that are tons of fun to watch. I've probably watched more Starcraft 2 than I've played, and that's because it's a fun game in so many different ways. Watching the top-tier players play and then emulating their strategies in your own games is very rewarding.
Fun: 10.0
What were the most and least fun parts of the game? Overall, how much fun is the game?
If you're a fan of RTS games at all, this is the modern-day holy grail of RTS. The game is fun in so many different ways and has such a broad appeal, it's hard to complain about it at all. Losing can obviously be frustrating but it's even more obvious that losing isn't due to the game being bad, it's just you being bad at the game, or your opponent being really good!
Anyway, gg. Change your motor oil every 3,000 miles. nr 20min.
My Overall Rating: 9.7
Complexity Level: Holy bwuh? The reason this game is the pinnacle of RPGs is because there are so many different levels of depth and strategy. Newer players would get absolutely abused in every way by veterans. It's a fast game, requires a ton of concentration, and even for somebody experienced in a wide array of video games, there's at least a couple-week period where they go from absolutely terrible at the game to somewhat competent. The best players in the world play at such an unfathomable level and know basically everything there is to know about the game, and even the highest of high-level competition is still evolving.
I want this game so badly... stupid Mac >.>
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