StarCraft 2

I'm not going to post a long review of StarCraft 2. I finished the campaign this weekend, and overall I'm very happy with the game, and the campaign itself. Game play was top-notch across the bored. Though the graphics aren't quite as top-notch, it's style and design--it's speed and fluidity more than makes up with the lack of photo-realistic visuals. The game itself is beautiful, and well animated. And the core game play is surprisingly good--it doesn't really reinvent the game, but the refinements are seemingly well thought out and provide a lot of new opportunities.

But, I have to say that the story and campaign itself bring everything down a bit. Starcraft 2 plays a lot like an RTS version of Wing Commander. You have your missions; your cut-scenes, and a central hub where you can talk to characters. It's all very good. But the Raynor-as-mercenary style of the campaign really kinda brings the whole thing down a bit. Essentially you have 6 or so ongoing story-arcs. You have Raynor helping a group of random settlers try to flee the Zerg. You have Tosh, trying to save his Specter buddies from a Dominion Prison. You have an artifact hunt, where you keep running across Kerrigan whose after the same artifacts. You have a Raynor-centric attempt to discredit the Dominion by exposing what actually happened on Tarsonis. And you have Zeratul asking you to relive his memories so you can understand why Raynor must save Kerrigan instead of destroy her. After those missions are complete, you can jump to Char and take on Kerrigan directly.

The structure of the campaign really prevents a single flowing narrative, and that's a shame. Each mini-plot has it's own  build-up; but each plot line can be completed in any order. Dialog choices and options change depending on where you are at during each mission; and the flow is such that each new mission grants you new units, and more money/research to buy upgrades. It's a good setup for a game, but as a story, it falters as you never really get a good sense of the war; or why Raynor would be trouncing about like he is when billions are dying around him.

Another issue I had was the structure of many of the missions. Now, don't get me wrong there is a lot of variety here. But, at the same time almost every mission imposes an artificial time limit of some form; and most of them have some form of gimmick that is fun the first time but will certainly grate with later play through. There are very few, if any, more traditional mission objectives here. And the scale simply seems smaller as a result. In Starcraft, a loft of the Terran missions lacked scale as well--but things really opened up by the later Zerg and Protoss missions. By the time things do start opening up on Char near the end, it's too little, too late. There is only 4 Char missions, and you can only do 3 of them. And the last one has a pretty strict time-limit imposed on it.

I think the nature missions means that in the long run the campaign will be less interesting to play through. And the game itself never reached the epic-levels I was expecting (at least from a story perspective). But, having just played SC recently, the game is certainly more fun and more interesting, with more choices to make than the original or Brood War. It's still certainly a game worth playing, even for those who normally avoid RTS games. But, it's just doesn't have the level of pure awesomeness that I was expecting going in. I guess my my expectations could not have been met anyway. But it would have been nice!