The most complete review of Starcraft 2 you will see here.
1st: SC was an epic game in his time. It presented us 3 factions (while the "normal" for an RTS was 2), not only perfectly balanced, which by itself is an achievement, but also the way you play with each and every one of them is totally different. SC was also an awesome display of top strategy game of his time. Please take notice that I often say "of his time". Yeah, things have changed, in case you didn't noticed, like Blizzard.
2nd: We, the fans, waited TWELVE years for SC2. I'll say that again: t-w-e-l-v-e years. Ok? Most people forget that.
Sure ain't easy to make a review of Starcraft 2. You will feel the urge the use many adjectives that you use normally to talk down about a game, but you'll want to use them to compliment SC 2. Unfortunatelly, this would be a biased and worthless opinion.
Let's jump to the facts about every aspect of this game. I'll give my opinion about every one of them, but I encourage you to form your own, based on the facts I'll expose.
Let's get to the technical stuff first.
Graphics:
Many has been said about the graphics. You will find people saying that "graphics are the best out there" and you will find people saying "graphics are outdated". So, who's right? The answer: both.
The graphics of starcraft 2 are outdated, cos the units and the buildings schematics are too simple. And generally speaking, you look at the game and don't see anything mind-blowing. But even so, you don't get the "this graphics sux" feeling. Why?
Cos if you look close, if you pay attention, you will see a LOT of details! Yes, the graphics aren't the best out there, but the ambient, the overall looks of the game is quite pleasing. Several light effects, along with light sources scattered through the map in certain missions, the explosion animations, the different ways units die depending on the type of damage of the attacker, all add to the details that the game presents to you. It's the famous "eye candy" that make Starcraft 2 a game with "regular" graphics with an outstanding attention to details.
Sound effects:
The sound effects are good. All those old terran sounds are present with a few new sounds. This is a good thing. In this part, I'd liked to be welcomed back by the game with those speech sounds I am quite familiar with, only more clear than SC 1.
The explosions, the warnings, the special abilities, the attacks, the in game talks between the characters, it's all good, no problems here.
Gameplay music:
Well, this is where SC 2 starts to crumble about the sound. I particularly don't get one thing: why the music while you are playing the campaign is one, and the music when you are playing a custom game or multiplayer is other? The music of the campaign is ok. Honestly, if you ask me to whistle the music, I won't be able to do it, cos it's quite forgettable. But the music during the custom game makes you feel quite annoyed. It doesn't look like a sci-fi space epic game music AT ALL. On the contrary, it's quite ridiculous. It's like listen to jazz while all the hell is breaking loose around you. I wish I had 10 hands just to give that music 10 thumbs down at once.
Now let's talk about the "prima donnas" of the game.
Campaign:
Since the very beggining of the campaign something tells you that something isn't quite right, and if you don't think about it, it's hard to explain. But once you do, it becomes clear.
Jim Raynor is back. Haunted by the memories of his beloved Sarah Kerrigan and his hatred Arcturus Mengsk, Raynor carries the guilt of an entire galaxy sector gone wrong in his shoulders: he watched Sarah being betrayed by Mengsk and being left to zergs, while he himself was being betrayed by Mengsk and his hunger for power. Cool, but why don't I feel all of this drama?
It's quite contradictory to play the SC 2 campaign: during the cinematics, you see all the glory of the story, everything that made SC to be what it is today. The most dramatic cinematic sequence is the one that remembers when Kerrigan was left for dead to the zergs.
But between and during missions... everything seems to be a big joke. No one takes anything seriously and you get the feeling that you are in the middle of a summer teen movie where Jim gather with his old fella Findley and go pester Mengsk, that uptight dude. Meanwhile, Jim have to deal with a vengefull ex-gf, that he want back.
The ambience of the Hyperion, where you are at between missions, also doesn't help at all. It's quite ridiculous that you are around year 2504 (since Starcraft was set around december 2499, then we got the Brood Wars and 4 years later we are at Starcraft 2) and you don't see anything, I mean ANYTHING, related to peculiarities of living on a far far away galaxy. The jukebox plays "sweet home alabama" and Findley calls Raynor a "cowboy" even though it's very likely that they never saw a real cow in their lives. I mean, today we don't listen to music made 80, 70 years ago, why they are listening to music made on earth more than 500 years ago? And why they are using terms of the old wild west that they probably never heard of?
And everything is very cheerful, every dialog has a joke.
So, no drama, no tension, you know that you will be betrayed since the beggining of the campaign and you know by who. No surprises.
The campaign try to sell you the idea of "replayability" but it's a lie. The missions are ridiculously easy and you don't need to think to get through then, cos the game tells you constantly what to do, where you should do it and when. Then you have achievements for the normal difficulty and the hard difficulty, but the fact that sometimes they are contraditory (meaning that you can't play on hard and get all achievements) forces you to play the mission again on normal! You beat the mission on hard, but to get the achievement you have to scale down the difficulty and play it again! How ridiculous is that? And then they call it "replayability".
The choices you make during the campaign are few and you definitly don't get the urge to play it again to see how it would end, cos it would end the same way. They are limited to "you wanna do this mission or that mission?" and since the missions don't challenge you at all, you won't care, you'll just want to end the campaign as soon as possible to see how the history ends.
You have some limited money to spend, but once you re-start the campaign you will realize that you will get the same upgrades as before, cos they are all linked to your favorite units and buildings, that you will use most once again. And since there isn't any variation on strategy, I mean, there isn't any strategy at all, you don't have any reasons to choose different upgrades.
The campaign is about the terrans, but the most tense and dramatic mission is a Protoss mission. Yes, you play a bit with the protoss, while Raynor delves into the memories of Zeratul. The final mission of this memories is about a vision that Zeratul had while trying to retrieve information from the carcass of the Overmind, a vision of the final days of all races of the galaxy, with the protoss being the last to fall. To play a mission that you know you will loose, but still have to accomplish some deeds to earn achievements was tense. And to see how those great heroes of the Protoss joined the battle, one by one, knowing that they would fall, but with the acknowledgment that they would fall together, as a race, united, was dramatic enough to make me feel quite sad with that mission. I only wish the main story was like that.
The campaign is a major failure. It doesn't challenge you, it doesn't put you into the atmosphere of drama and urge to accomplish the missions, it spits on your face with a promise of replayability that it's only a flaw of intellect by whoever conceived those achievements.
Some people (me included) are also complaining about the long load times on campaign with tons of work by the hard drive, even if you have like 6 gb of RAM. The complains are on official forums and the last time I checked, though it has more than 100 posts of angry people that exceeds the recommended settings, it didn't have any official word from Blizzard staff yet. So we don't know if it's a bug or what.
Multiplayer:
Welcome to battle.net 2.0! Where it's impossible to play with your friends from elsewhere on the world, it's impossible to have full functionality if you don't have facebook, it's impossible to talk on chat rooms, cos they don't exist... well, welcome!
The Bnet 2.0 problems are all over the fan sites. Blizzard is being pressed hardly by fans in their own forums to address several bad decisions taken by them. I won't discuss this here, cos all it takes to you to see it is a google search. The **** has hit the fan.
Other than that, it's quite sad that 2 units that finally became favorites, the firebat (the original one needed a dose of micro management to prevent him from frying your own units, including themselves) and the goliath (the original was dumb. Simply dumb. If you played, you know what I'm talking about) doesn't make it to the multiplayer battles. You learn to love some units on the campaign only to see that they are not available on multiplayer or custom games. Well done Blizzard!
The one thing that could save this game on multiplayer was custom maps. But unfortunately, once again Blizzard screw up and with his Bnet 2.0 presented limitations to "publish" maps that simply removes from the table like 90% of possible good maps that were present on Warcraft 3. Like the other problems of Bnet 2.0, it takes only a google search to learn why I'm saying this, so I won't discuss this here either.
Overall:
Overall the game isn't bad, but it isn't good either. Remember: we waited 12 years.
It's quite sad that reviewing sites are all sold outs. To see this game earning a "9,5" here on gamespot was a disappointment, specially when it's a game that doesn't inovate in anything. Remember what I said about the adjectives that you often use to talk down about a game? You will see all that on gamespot's review, but all for the best:
- The game don't innovate on gameplay? Let's call that a "refreshing jorney back to the good old days" instead of "derivative" or "been there, done that".
- The new Bnet doesn't offer half of the old one did? Let's call it "minor inconveniences" and exalt the single player campaign that takes a day or two to finish, in a game that costs U$ 60,00.
- The campaign offer choices in two different missions (of 27 total) that in the end doesn't make any difference? Let's call it "replay value" instead of "low money value", even though Chrono Trigger, a game from 1995 for SNES, had more choices and more impact with those choices with 13 different ways to end the game.
I see plenty of game here on gamespot earning 6.0's and 7.0's with the same adjectives justifying the low review. But those games didn't have Blizzard and its massive publicity budget being threw at all this review sites. Blizzard sold themselves to Activision and its anti-customer policy, and Gamespot sold itself to publicity money.
It's a shame.