Starcraft Review Thing

So, I kinda want to put up more reviews of games I play or movies I watch or anything else I feel like talking about, and well I’m going to start with this.  If you’re extremely worried about plot spoilers maybe you shouldn’t read this, but I shouldn’t be putting in really hard ones, but I may say a couple things that make some surprises in the game a little less surprising.

In Starcraft 2 you take the role of Jim Raynor, a returning character from the first Starcraft game (in fact, I think all of the really important characters at least show up for a little bit).  He used to be allied with the current emperor (Arcturus Mengsk), but when Mengsk turned out to be evil and leaving a third person in their group behind to die (Sarah Kerrigan) Raynor, who seems to have had the hots for Kerrigan, said it was too much, and decided to fight against Mengsk but Mengsk took over and became emperor.  Meanwhile Kerrigan instead of dieing ended up basically becoming an alien, and took over their forces and generally became evil and very powerful leading the zerg.  Now, if you cry spoilers at this I say too bad, this is all from the first game (and actually makes up about 1/2 the manual for SC2, which has no info at all about playing the game) you’ve had 12 years, if you didn’t know yet you don’t actually care.

In the four years since the end of the “Brood War” things haven’t actually changed much.  Raynor, still a rebel wants to fight against Mengsk, but being a sort of criminal is having a hard time coming up with resources and so is sort of a mercenary.  No one’s been quite sure what the zerg and Kerrigan have been up to, they’ve been off on their own, and anyone who goes to try and find out ends up not coming back.

The zerg suddenly show up again attacking various human worlds without giving much reason, and then the real story starts.  However not much really happens.  Characters show up, you do some work for them, then just as you’re starting to like them they leave.  There are people who betray you but it’s pretty obvious right from the beginning that you can’t really trust them so it’s not that surprising, and pretty much just like any other video game storyline.  Speaking of many of the characters being kind of bland, if you’re familiar with both the warcraft and starcraft stories you may like this (and by like I mean be upset at the lack of creativity).  The villain in the game, (The Queen of Blades/The Lich King) was once (Sarah Kerrigan/Arthas Menethil) a member of the elite (ghost commandos/paladins of the silver hand) but was corrupted by the evil (Overmind/Ner’Zuhl).  They soon become so powerful that they end up in charge of the (zerg/scourge) which uses a (virus/plague) to turn normal people, including the armies fighting them, into minions in their own armies.

I’m trying not to spoil the ending of starcraft 2 here, but I just want to say that I found the ending to be unsatisfying.  We’ve pretty much all heard by now that starcraft 2 isn’t going to be one game but three, and they want to tell the story over the course of the three games.  Instead of using cliffhangers though, they want the whole story to be made up of three smaller stories, and in this part I think it fails.  I don’t know for sure what’s coming, but I feel like pretty much nothing you do really matters for the larger story except for one thing.  And the independant story that doesn’t need the larger one?  Well turns out you don’t really accomplish anything, by the end you’re pretty much where you were when you started, it feels like the story is only getting started, but since the next games are going to be the other races, which don’t really care about human politics I can’t imagine the questions I have at the end of this campaign regarding what happens next will be answered.

So that’s kinda where I sit regarding the single player campaign in Starcraft 2.  I feel like it could have been better, whether you like the games or not I think it’s hard to argue that Blizzard doesn’t put out great games, and I think I was expecting more.  It’s good enough to keep you interested and playing, but in the end the story is just pretty standard video game writing, nothing particularly special.

Several times throughout the game you’re given choices whether to side with one character or another but it really has no outcome on the over-arching story, just the next mission (or for the last one, the next 2 missions) and a decoration you can look at between missions.

As for gameplay they seem to have not really wanted to change things too much from the first game, people would get upset at them if it was anything more than minor tweaks from what made Starcraft Starcraft.  I’ve you’ve played a blizzard RTS before, you’ll know how this game plays.  You tend to need to micro-manage your armies better in this game than in most other RTS games, but that’s standard for blizzard.  At least with this game they removed the things they put in Warcraft 3 with the upkeeps and the focus on heroes.  It’s nice not being punished for trying to have more than 10 guys.

Multi-player has a sort of weird feel in it coming from the single player.  It feels like there’s so much content that they just completely removed from the single player.  I’m probably going to forget some, but units in the single player but not multi player include: medic, firebat, vulture, goliath, diamondback, wraith, science vessel, predator, and some transport whos name I forget right now, as well as the nifty models on the mercanaries (if someone from blizzard reads this, which I know they wont, you should make the models unlockable in multi-player so that you can use them instead if you want even if they don’t have the stat bonuses)  This is also just the terran race here, there’s also a few zerg units that don’t make it to multiplayer.  I suppose it makes sense though, since the campaign was only Terran (although there are 4 or so Protoss missions) you would sort of expect them to flesh out the Terrans more and by not including all the units it made their lives easier for multiplayer, since they don’t need to make a similar amount of units for the other races (but probably will for the next 2 games) so I expect to see some of these units with the next game as they add to multiplayer, but as for now it just sort of makes the multiplayer feel incomplete, and if you’re a player who prefers the Terran then when the zerg game comes out in a year or two and there’s completely new units for the zerg and protoss that you’ve not been able to use before, you’re going to probably end up with something you’ve known about and been able to play with for a couple years, and that will feel boring.

All this said it’s still a fun game, I’ll be playing it a bunch, and if you haven’t yet add me as a friend so we can play together.

Alright, so here’s a spoiler, if I get it working right, highlight the text from here…

The Zerg campaign is coming next, if she’s really redeemed who’s going to be the main character in it?  I suppose they could have it take place before this one in the timeline, or alongside it, but then that means we don’t get to know what happens next.  My guess is that the one thing you do achieve in the terran campaign turns out to not actually have worked.

… to here to see it.  From here on I’m just adding a few words to the end of this because when I previewed that “here to here” thing it was hard to notice the second part in the end of post graphics and text, so this way you will definitely see it, I’ve been done for a while though so why are you still reading.  In fact why am I still typing, I’ve got lots of stuff that needs to be done before tonight and since I’ve been playing Starcraft all week it hasn’t got done yet.  So if you are in the group of family who I’m seeing this weekend and things seem rushed and not planned, it’s Blizzard’s fault for releasing Starcraft at about the same time I was going to really start getting things ready.