Archive for July, 2010

Starcraft II

After a decade of waiting, I arrived at our local Wal-Mart at around 11:30 to pick up my copy of Starcraft II. I wandered into the electronics department to scope out the nerd gathering and see if I could sneak a copy of it without having to join in some type of geek conglomerate waiting on the game to go on sale. No such luck, about 5 or so people already there before me. So after waiting in line with about 15 other Starcraft fans; at 12:01 AM on July 27th I brought home my very own copy of the Starcraft II Collector’s Edition.

Not being sure if the beta client would just patch up to retail; I had uninstalled it earlier the day. So I went ahead and went through the retail disk installation. Kind of glad I did as the installer gave a nice recap of the story from the original Starcraft and briefly touched on Brood Wars to get you ready for the campaign that I would soon be undertaking.

I had put many of hours into the beta and was itching for some multi-player but ultimately decided to go ahead and start my Starcraft II experience with the campaign first. Greeted with Blizzard’s quality CG cinematic, my personal little SC2 launch party had started. It drops you into the story pretty quick, while there’s some very beginner tutorials available from the main screen, the game doesn’t force you to go through the normal RTS, “this is how you drag your mouse over units” type of garbage. The first few missions were simple enough, just getting your feet wet and setting the stage for the rest of the game.

Once I finished the first couple missions and was greeted with the mission “staging” area I guess I’ll call it; it became apparent this wasn’t an ordinary RTS single player campaign. Blizzard had crafted something unique and different here. They really nailed how to deliver a compelling story in an interactive way in Starcraft II. While keeping the gameplay true to RTS. The story also seems a lot more focused which I assume was the point of releasing the campaigns as 3 seperate games (and of course more $$$). While Terran is my least favorite of the Starcraft races, I still felt completely absorbed into the story of Jim Raynor and his fight against the Dominion which I credit to the storytelling.

The stories core is pretty simple and a little cliché at times but it’s still very enjoyable. It’s the delivery and presentation that makes it work so well I think.  The campaign is not terribly long, maybe 10 hours or so on my first playthrough on Normal difficulty (including the “secret mission”). The achievements in the game are actually sort of compelling which is a nice change from normal Xbox/WoW achievements. It’s not so much appealing for me to collect them for the sake of it, but they’re almost like little challenges like beating a mission on Hard in a restricted time frame. It makes me say, “hmm, I bet I can do that.”  This gives the game some re-playability outside of just the multi-player.

There is also a “Challenge” mode in the game which is sort of interesting. It basically gives you a handful of units to use, some situations or units to fight and tested you on your method of successfully dealing with various situations. Almost like a training mode for the crap you’ll run into in multi-player. Of course there’s also the multi-player itself which will be an ongoing discussion here on Orboro.net so not going to get into that right now.

Overall I expected Starcraft II’s single player campaign to be “good”, but what I got was something pretty “amazing”.  Thank you Blizzard.