My review about Starcraft II - Wings of Liberty
First off, I got this game from my mate's granny - no shit - she asked him if he'd wanna have that game, knowing I'd buy it anyway he said "sure" even though he already had it, then gave it to me. So kudos to him!
Okay so the first thing I had to do was create a Battlenet account with the serial that comes with the game, basically you only need that serial to play because Blizzard offers SC2 as a free download on their website. Being logged in to your account is necessary to play though, you can't do anything without being logged in, not even watch replays.
The game interface is very simple, you feel comfortable while browsing leagues, looking for games, chatting with your buddies or in a public channel, it's really well done.
Those were just some things I noticed when I first started the game, so here goes the actual review.
1.) The Campaign
I beat the campaign like 2 weeks ago, I think it was fun overall though sometimes too easy if you got some experience in WC3 or other RTS games.
I liked the nicely designed missions and the fact that it's gradually getting harder as new unit types are unlocked. You start mission 1 with Space-Marines only, then in mission 2 you can choose to unlock either Marauders or Reapers. That's basically how it goes, until you unlocked every unit there is.
There's always a main quest in a mission which you have to fulfill as well as one or more side quests which can be fulfilled optionally. Those side quests usually grant you science points if fulfilled which you can use in the Laboratory to buy upgrades for your units (those only affect the campaign by the way). Some of those upgrades and even some of the units are available in the campaign only.
What I didn't like about the campaign is that it's Terran race only. Out of the 3 SC2 races (Protoss, Terrans, Zerg) you only get to play Terrans to their full extent. You get to play some little Protoss scenarios too but they're not nearly satisfying. Luckily Blizzard announced an add-on to be released in early 2012.
2.) Scenarios
Starcraft II comes with 9 singleplayer scenarios, they're meant to improve the player's understanding about the different units, armor types, special abilities, micro-management, how to defend a rush (being attacked by another player very early in the game) and so on. Depending on your performance you get a bronze-, silver- or gold-medal. Those are saved in your profile as achievements - which is gonna be the next point.
3.) Achievements
One, if not the only reason to re-play the campaign are achievements. They're basically everywhere in SC2, there's literally tons of them. Achievements for the campaign, for the scenarios, for multiplayer and for playing the game in general. Some of them are easy to obtain, some of them extremely hard. You can manually showcase your achievements in your profile.
Sometimes upon unlocking an achievement you also unlock a new avatar picture. You can view the requirements of all the achievements in the game.
4.) MultiplayerYeah I put it fat and shiny because it's the best feature about the whole game.
There's many ways of playing a multiplayer game in SC2. For example you can search for a custom game. This will show public hosted games in a list, simply double-click one to join and you're good to go. You can also invite friends to join the game you're in or create a group with your mate before joining and have the game put you both into the same game automatically. There are dozens of custom maps with a wide variety of objectives, much like in WC3, also Tower Defenses and a map similar to DotA, but not nearly as good.
4.1) The LadderThe probably most common way of playing a multiplayer game is to click that "find match" button.
Upon clicking it for the first time it will ask you to play 5 relegation matches.
Right, short interlude here - I'll have to explain that there are 7 different ladder leagues. They're Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platin, Diamond, Master and Grandmaster - Bronze being the lowest of them. Each league has infinite divisions (as many as needed), each division has 200 players at max. The only exception is the Grandmaster league which is limited to the top 200 of the respective server.
After playing your 5 relegation matches you'll be put into a league depending on your performance. Every time you play a ladder match now the system is gonna look for a player in your skill-range. You gain points for a win and lose points for a loss, your main goal is to reach the top 8 in your division to get promoted to the next league. Up till now it never took me longer than 2 minutes to find a ladder game. But then again I only played like 15 ladder matches so far.
You can play ladder matches in 1vs1, 2vs2, 3vs3 and even 4vs4 modes. Group up with friends or enter without group to play with strangers, it's fun playing with more than just 2 people.
5.) The Community
From what I experienced till now the SC2 community is pretty friendly overall, there's hardly ever someone who doesn't say "gg" after the game and generally you could say the people are willing to help out newbies. There's also black sheep among them, probably more than here on W:A, that's just my impression.
Starcraft 2 is one of the most popular games right now, hence there are lots of tournaments, championships and tons of prize money. The
North American Star League being one of the biggest tournaments
outside of Korea gave $65.000 to their first season winner
PuMa.
As good as this sounds, the chances of ever hitting the top at a popular game like this is very close to zero. It's great entertainment and good for the learning progress to watch
live streams of the pros though!
tl;dr - Starcraft 2 is a must have for everyone who likes RTS-games and serious competition. I can't really measure the long term fun factor as of now, but I think don't think the game will disappoint me anytime soon.
If I forgot to mention anything, feel free to ask!
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Topic: ** PC Game Reviews ** (Read 8295 times)