Starcraft 2
I’m not at all a big gamer. I enjoy the occasional game (usually leading to ‘oh crap, it’s 5 AM already?’ moments), but I don’t play a whole lot. But, after all the buzz surrounding it, I wanted to check out Starcraft 2.
I only played the campaign. I usually get kicked big time in multiplayer so I’m not even bothering to try that.
Anyway, I have to say, the campaign is fun to play. The story isn’t particularly good or revolutionary (and pretty predictable), but it serves its purpose of sending you in a direction where you can blow stuff up. (Yay for blowing stuff up.) What I do like is how the campaign is done: usually in an RTS the campaign is linear: you have to do mission A, then mission B, then mission C, repeat until end. In Starcraft 2 you get to pick what you want to do when, and not everything is mandatory. Doing missions does however grant you more types of units, allows you to purchase permanent upgrades for your forces, and there is the research thing which makes things interesting as well.
Most missions are the same in the basic turn of events – ie you go somewhere, you build a base, train forces, attack (or defend) something, and ‘lo and behold, the mission succeeded. It does not however feel repetitive to do so, which is obviously a good thing. Several missions have interesting twists to them – one for instance (and don’t read this if you don’t want a spoiler) involves a wall of fire, caused by a sun about to go nova, that slowly moves accross the maps and forces you to push onwards and relocate your base several times over. This relies on the interesting (though realistically speaking, completely absurd) possibility of letting most of the building in your base take off, fly somewhere else, and land again. You’ll need to rebuild a few structures after each relocation but most can be moved that way.
The campaign plot is pretty generic. Rogue hero fights against evil empire to free the people (and of course the inevitable element of rescueing a long lost girlfriend), slowly gets to his goal, after gaining some sort of a foothold comes the ever-present inspiring speech after which the troops march into almost certain doom and succeed againt all odds. The girlfriend of course is saved, the old friend who betrayed the hero is killed, and they all happily watched the credits roll over the screen.
While the campaign is fun to play, the core of the game is similar to pretty much every other RTS that’s out there. You’ve got the technologically mediocre humans who, of course, are the big good guys who rule over most of the galaxy, there’s the mysterious ancient alien race with expensive but strong units, and the guys that rely on hordes of weak units to flood their way to whatever their goal is. The game mechanics are fairly uninspiring but they work well and do provide a good couple of hours worth of time-spending.
One thing I do love big time is the mech unit called ‘Thor’. Like most mech units it is entirely unrealistic, but it’s voice sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger and it has some of the more awesome quotes I’ve heard from RTS-game-units in a while. It bothers me that it is not really THAT powerful and you need a bunch of them to really do anything, even though it is supposed to be based of Odin, a really giant mech that pretty much vaporizes anything (where did he go after the broadcast tower mission, anyway?), but the line ‘I am here, click me!’ easily makes up for that. Most of the other units’ speech is less interesting (and especially in case of the marines, starts to annoy really quickly), but who listens to that anyway.
Overall I’ve so far found Starcraft 2 to be enjoyable, but to say that it’s a big revolution that was really worth waiting so many years for… ?
No, not really.
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