Starcraft II

User Rating: 7 | Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty PC

http://katiejurek.com

This game as a second entry to the Starcraft series is so mindblowingly disappointing. The worst part is that it's not even the gameplay itself that makes it bad, it's the horrendous UI that gets in the way of absolutely everything. I tried to get into this game for the original Starcraft's sake, but at every turn, there was some huge issue that prevented me from being able to enjoy it.

Pros

- Its similarity to the original Starcraft.

- The campaign is really, really well done.

Cons

- Instead of being greeted with a simple "Single Player" or "Multiplayer" option, there are far too many buttons with similar names or functions, and it's not clear at all which one does what until you've just spent considerable time clicking everything.

- It is really, really difficult and complex to even set up a game. There are so many options and combinations of options instead of a simple interface with two buttons, "Add team" and "Add computer". This arrangement would make it easy to set up your melee games with the correct number of teams and AI. Instead, they try to include multiple options for how you'll play, and it doesn't make sense at all. Trying to set up a 1v3 game took me over 10 minutes to do, and even then, I was only finally able to accomplish it because I picked a map that had an option similar enough to what I wanted to do. What happened to being able to do anything on any map?

- The mapmaking has really gone downhill. The editor dropped most of its user-friendliness in favor of being overly powerful. This is a huge hit to the mapmaking community, which was one of the quintessential things about Starcraft to begin with.

- The downfall of Use Map Settings games, which, frankly, were the main reason I played Starcraft. I haven't even been able to find any of these games. As a seasoned Starcraft player, if I can't figure out your interface, this is a very, very bad thing.

- You can't easily see where you can't build your buildings; this means it's extremely easy to overlook that you can't finish fleshing out your, let's say, Terran defense, in a certain location until you're already halfway through doing so, because of something stupid like there's too tall of grass in the way. My SCV can't knock that down with his huge machine body, really?

- The map is auto-revealed at the start. What the hell?

- The colors all seem to blend into one another. I really dislike this road that many games are taking, the trying-so-hard-to-be-more-realistic one that ends up making everything blend in with each other instead of being distinct and unique.

- Basically anything besides the campaign that isn't the actual gameplay itself is a con. My frustration in this game comes hardly at all from actually playing it, but instead lies in me trying to make a game and navigate the UI every time to begin with.