Gaming StarCraft 2 review

I am old enough to have played the original, but I can't say I found anything outstanding about it and as a result only played it a few times. I'm not sure what to make of this, there's a part of me that thinks I should get it to play with my friends, as surely there must be something good about it. But then I remember that the only good fun I've had with any Blizzard RTS is tower defence, and that doesn't justify the price.

I also hate overly zoomed in camera's with venemously (a la recent C&Cs), so these screens aren't doing much to persuade me!

 

Oh wait, you click on the picture then it expands... I stand corrected on that last point!

 

Will be buying this tomorrow. I have to have it. Loved the first, loved the beta, WILL LOVE THIS.

 

At least this review should (although I very much doubt it) shut up the ridiculous haters crying that just because there are three games, then they must only be one third of a game each.

 

I haven't much time to play it, but my first thought was:
"This is the first let down EVER from blizzard".

Not a total let down, but it isn't a top notch game like they use to do.
I may be wrong, because i've just played up to level 5.

 

Looking forward to playing this, it sounds ace, only thing putting me off is the £32-35 price and it not being on Steam.

Does the DVD need to be in the drive to play this? as I hate that when it's all on the hard drive anyway which is why I only buy games on Steam. If it doesn't I might buy it.

Also how much is it to buy and download from battle.net? They make you create an account before they tell you the price!

 

You dont need a DVD in a drive to play it although you'll need to create a battle net account and login, I'm not sure if there is an offline mode.

Some of the music is great very FireFly esq!

 

That's below the RRP. RRP is actually £44.99.

 

Greetings!

Or US$59.99 (£38.42) or 59,99€ (£50.22).

 

just playing through game atm and it bringss back fond memories of the old one

on another note the music definitely nods towards metallica at some points and there are quite a few good guitar solo. thumbs up for the ingame music!

 

Interesting. I went through the menu system and jumped right into multiplayer (I have enough SCBW experience that I felt comfortable just jumping in, although I still haven't learned how to use any of the many new units yet), and I felt like there was a very strong Freelancer feel in how the menus were.

SC had this interesting industrial-space theme going on. The menus and interfaces had a sort of rusted, aged look to them. You didn't feel like the spaceships were these majestic, graceful creatures - they looked rough and mean and battered up.

SC2 has a much more freelancer-esque menus, that look like you are reading them on some fancy 3D holographic display on the bridge of a super high tech spaceship.

 

meh, I build miners at the one second mark.

The best way to get going is to build up a large number of miners as quickly as possible. Resources are essential. It's about microing and controlling, but the biggest and strongest army is usually the best army.

It's a gamble. I often neglect combat units for the first couple of minutes, because the resource advantage will carry me through late game. Of course, that's easy to counter. A popular Zerg strategy back in the day was the six-pool. As soon as you had a spawning pool, you created six lings (each larva is two lings) and send them to the enemy base. If you were lucky, your enemy hadn't trained combat units yet (this is like less than two minutes into the game), and you could kill them.

Otherwise, focusing on resources early gives you a better army later.

Like any game, there are early-game strategies, mid-game strategies, and late-game strategies. Rushing is effective if you do it right, but an unsuccessful rush will put you too far behind. I just had a game where my teammate and I got rushed, but we held them off, and then crushed them about 15 minutes later because they expended all of their resources building an army to rush, and I spent mine getting more resources to build a much bigger army.

Has anyone got a look at the regular maps? I really hope that some of the great maps are retained. There are a couple excellent WC2 maps that were remade into SCBW maps, and then into Warcraft 3 maps (I don't remember all of their names). I think I saw Lost Temple, but there were a pair of great 8 player ones that I hope are still around.

 

all these great reviews, i like to ask... hows the trilogy decision affects your judgement?

does it have enough content for $60? what if you dont want to play MP at all? does it have enough SP to justify $60?

 

Can't wait to start jumping into the custom maps with custom units and UI and all


It's definitely has enough content to justify 60$.

 

So far there seems to be replay value in SP. You can handle the missions in different ways. From upgrading certain troops to changing up your research options. Then if you want all the achievements you can go back through collecting those. I'm on the 9th mission and about 8hrs into the campaign. I believe there is 20+ missions so I'm figuring 30+hrs of play because things are starting to take longer.

SC2 was worth the $60 because it's keeping me busy and interested.

 

The game is packed full of easter eggs too.. the Tauren Space Marine in one of the early missions is quite hilarious. There's also the Diablo fire lord guy in the rising lava level at the bottom right corner of map.

 

I'm definitely liking it. The "challenge" mode is also a great place to become famialized with unit countering.

 

The campaign is 20hrs+ on normal difficulty, with achievements and challenges and multiple sub-plot endings. It feels like a very generous single player campaign, well up to standards. I just hope the 2 expansion packs can deliver as much!

 

Exactly, I like building my base and scrounging for rescources... Why? Because I suck at strategic battles. So I hoard and defend until I can create a max troop limit army, and THEN I swarm the AI. I don't play mutli on almost every strategy game I have... except Sins of a Solar Empire, because on the large maps youcan turtle safely.

 

They're technically not expansion packs as Blizzard mentioned that all 3 games will be able to function independently and all 3 contain a full fledged 20+ hour campaign.