Review – StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (PC)

I don’t envy the designers of StarCraft II one bit. It is as if someone came to them and said, “We want you to reinvent hockey.” How could such expectations be met? Twelve years of familiarity and mastery of the original StarCraft would not dethroned easily, and yet that’s exactly what StarCraft II (SC2) has set out to do: to supplant Korea’s national (e)Sport. All “gaming is serious business” type issues aside, though, how is StarCraft II as a game? It’s fantastic.

The single player campaign is magnificent. There’s nothing ground breaking here, but Blizzard did manage to make it interesting enough that it doesn’t feel like you’re just playing a bunch of multiplayer maps, which is something the older Blizzard strategies always had trouble with. Despite strong plots in both StarCraft and Warcraft III, the single player campaigns were lacking to me. This time around, Blizzard gives you an entirely different experience in single player as you can command completely different units than in multiplayer, get special upgrades for your buildings and units that don’t exist outside the single player campaign, and you can talk to people on your ship in order to get a better feel of the story and characters. The story is told in a much better way this time around and the single player experience simply feels way more cohesive than it did back in the day, even if we only get the perspective of the Terrans (humans) in this one. The plot was even quite surprising and takes a turn I did not expect. It’s not Odyssey or anything like that, but it certainly ain’t bad.

Nuclear launch detected

The cinematics are a treat as expected from Blizzard, but the in-game engine looks so good that it’s not a jarring switch. Moreover, as if to ensure you that it is in fact a Blizzard product, all the good looks doesn’t come with hefty requirements for your system. If you have a good system then the game will look better, but even on my four-ish year old PC it is gorgeous. Blizzard wants you to play their games, and they’re not going to let an old machine stop you! Since the engine is 3D this time around, zooming in will give you nice and up close visuals of the units or landscape, but if you zoom out to the regular camera, everything still looks… pleasant. I’ve heard some higher level players say that they like to turn the graphics down in order to not have so much visual input to distract them – that’s how much detail there is in the animation. My favourite little addition is that when units die to a fire attack, they are incinerated and fried up in a neat animation.

The voice acting is very good. The dialogue itself is very heavy and a bit on the serious side, aside from the newscasts and commercials on television, but the actors did a good job of making everything believable. One hilarious commercial in particular is the space marine iPod parody with a silhouetted marine touting an “iGun”. The game does not have the best voice acting out there. It didn’t quite impress me the way Dragon Age: Origins did, but it was solid. The music in the single player campaign is fantastic, with the likes of covers of Sweet Home Alabama and Suspicious Minds while the jukebox is on. During a mission, there are great musical scores to go along with building up armies and crushing the souls of your enemies under your metallic boots. The unit sounds are standard Blizzard fare and thankfully none of them are annoying, though some of them are still humourous.

You villain, you!

The mission variety itself is great, and better than in previous games. Even though achievements are old news in this industry, and I normally don’t worry about them, the addition of them still added a great deal to the experience for me. Every map has an award for achieving all the objectives, which is something I’d do normally anyway, but it’s nice to receive some recognition for my OCD dedication. You can go back to clear a previous level at any time through the mission archives, even after you’ve completed the game, so that is a great addition to the longevity of the game, even just considering the single player alone. On top of the various difficulties you can play through, there are also 3 missions where you have to choose branching paths, and one secret mission. Thankfully, the alternate paths can be explored through the aforementioned archives, but unfortunately the secret mission can’t be unlocked after you clear the campaign, so it looks like I’ll have to play through it again at some point. In addition to the campaign, the single player experience also includes tutorials for people that are new to the franchise or real-time strategies, and it also includes a series of challenges that are intended to get the player ready for multiplayer. These challenges include multitasking, micromanagement (topics covered in our StarCraft II Guide) and other skills you’ll need to not feel completely helpless.

It's true. This game has lasers.

As great as the twenty-hourish single player campaign is, StarCraft II is really about the multiplayer. There has been a lot of debate about Battle.net 2.0 and its lack of various features, but since Blizzard has agreed to fix most of the issues, I won’t evaluate them here. What has been added to Battle.net is pleasant. Players can view their profiles, see their match history, look up their opponents’ profiles, and it includes the ever important replay system, which itself is vastly improved over the Warcraft III replay system. The look of it is much much nicer and there is a cross-game IM type service embedded that will allow you to chat with your friends that are playing World of Warcraft while playing SC2. The cross-game functionality unfortunately comes at the cost of sharing your real email address, so it might not be for every one of your guildmates, but it’s a pretty cool idea nonetheless. The matchmaking and ladder system has also been improved over Warcraft III and StarCraft, as now players will play 5 placement matches to determine their skill. Thereafter, they get placed in a league where they can be promoted or demoted from, but otherwise will play people of around the same skill level. No matchmaking system will be perfect, but I like the idea of placement matches so that people don’t get too frustrated when they first start playing against other people. The feature that was surprisingly lacking was clan support, which games like Heroes of Newerth has done a great job of implementing.

Blizzard has gone great lengths in order to make the game more accessible. Even casual players won’t be too overwhelmed with trying to control many units as they can put them into one control group now, and the algorithm to determine the path that your units take (called pathing) has been greatly improved so that your units don’t run around stupidly and get stuck behind everything in the universe. Doing the advanced things and clicking faster is still a benefit to you, but you can still play without incredible skill.

There's too many of them!

As a watchable eSport, StarCraft II is much more entertaining than the original. There are a variety of strategies, and though maybe 12 years of refinement will stamp out most of them, the improved spectator UI and graphics alone make it more of a delight to watch. There are already massive tournaments (as well as smaller ones) being organized, paying winners over $80,000 USD, so there is no doubt in my mind that it will succeed as an eSport as players will flock to where the money is. Even though there is so much infrastructure dedicated to Brood War, it will all be replaced in time.

Blizzard had to make a great game with StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, not because they had to sell a lot of units, but because it might be twelve years before we see StarCraft III. As a big fan of the original, I can honestly say I am not disappointed with the sequel. They have made the game more accessible, more fun to watch, more fun to play, and it still has the depth of strategy as its predecessor. It doesn’t add anything innovative to the genre like Company of Heroes did, but it had an extremely delicate balance to uphold. It couldn’t shed all the history and fans before it and yet it had to be new. I wouldn’t call it refreshing, but gaming is certainly a better place now that StarCraft II has arrived.