En Taro Adun, Ambassador!
Blizzard Entertainment seems to have hit another one out of the park with their release of the highly anticipated real time strategy space game Star Craft II (SCII). For fans of the 1998 original, you will greatly enjoy this game. The human Confederate South themed Terrans, the technologically advanced, psionic Protoss, and the insectoid, swarm hive of the Zerg are all back to do battle once again. Loosely defined a Real Time Strategy, or RTS, is a game where you and your opponent work concurrently, not turn based, to defeat one another. In Star Craft II, this involves a race to gather resources and begin constructing the necessary forces to eventually conquer and defeat your opponent. Most RTS games require players to multi-task in order to maximize efficiency in resource collection, unit production and order assignments. So what does all that mean?
In short, a really fun and addictive game. SCII does not reinvent the wheel. The game mechanics and interface are exactly the same as in SCI. If it ain't broke don't fix it! In fact, I found playing SCII very nostalgic for the first few sessions. You begin play on the map with some drones to gather natural resources, crystals and gas, and a base to process the crystals. This allows you to build different buildings that can produce different units. For example, the Terran Barracks produces many infantry units. Many units can be upgraded, provided the buildings are upgraded themselves or specialty buildings are constructed. However, the upgrades lead to many unique and powerful units that can have a huge impact on the game. However, everything has a cost, in terms of resources, that must be met before the unit or building is constructed. It is the gathering of resources and the careful management of their expenditure that is crucial to success in Star Craft II. It is the core and most fun part of the game. Once you have sufficient forces, you may then set out for mission objectives or attack an enemy's base. So the order you gather crystals and gas, construct your base, defenses, buildings, upgrades, and units (or "build" as it is known) is very important. In the end, this is what makes Star Craft II so fun. The mechanics are the same, and really, not much improved. However, that is a good thing.
What is vastly improved though is the campaign storyline, missions, battle.net interface and game graphics. The campaign story picks up where the last game ended. During SCII installation, there is a nice slide show summary of the events of SCI to bring you up to speed. The storyline is linear, but in SCII you have multiple missions to choose from. This means you get to choose how the story is revealed. You have several NPC contacts to interact with that provide storyline dialogue. In between missions, there are movie like cut scenes that tell the story of SCII. They are very well done and entertaining. I ofter find myself doing "just one more mission" just to get the next bit of story!
The battle.net interface, which you have to open an account with to play the game, is very impressive. Once you open your account, you create an online character. This is not a character in SCII, but rather your online persona to interact with other players over battle.net. A word of caution here, as once you name your character, you cannot change it! From the interface, you can select to play the campaign, other players, the computer, mulitplayer games, or participate in the online league. You can even set the difficulty level of the campaign and AI matches. The league ranks its members and the competition is on! There are also many achievements you can unlock in the game, earning you points and other rewards. In addition, there are community forums, a newsletter Com Link Online and other neat bits of information found in the interface. A nice feature of battle.net is realID. This allows you to enter the email of a real life friend to add them to your realID friends list. This allows you to communicate with them in a facebook type fashion across multiple Blizzard games. Currently, these are World of Warcraft and Star Craft II, but others will be added later (Diablo III anyone?).
The game graphics are amazing. The maps are detailed, some with creatures or inhabitants milling about. The different units and buildings are all also very detailed. This gives the game a very polished and unique look and feel. How the units attack is one of the cooler graphics in the game. It's pretty neat to watch a Firebat engulf some Zerglings in flames! The sound effects and sound track are equally well done and simply add to the immersion of playing in the Star Craft Universe.
All in all, with great RTS play, battle.net interface, and superb graphics quality Star Craft II is fantastic game. But then again, coming from Blizzard, I was expecting nothing less.
Enjoy!
-Wicked
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