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Starcraft 2 Review: The RTS King is Back

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Almost every mission is unique in some way, offering enough variety to keep the campaign from feeling like a framing system for player-versus-AI matches. The different planets have their own hazards and gimmicks, and really force you to adapt to different situations. On one level, you have to mine minerals to equip your army, but periodic lava surges force you to pack up your base and move to higher ground before the mineral-rich valleys become flooded with molten death. On another level, you'll guide a super-powerful robot to cause damage and panic, giving your team a chance to get a foothold in a city. On yet another level, you'll race to destroy archives before the Zerg can access the deadly secrets inside. The variations in gameplay really ensure that the single-player game doesn't ever get stale or feel like a framing device for bland player-versus-AI matches.

Blizzard integrated cinematic storytelling and RPG elements into the single-player campaign with far greater success than Warcraft 3. The story of Jim Raynor's return to action is told through both in-game-engine and pre-rendered cutscenes. Starcraft 2 breaks up the overarching story into a handful of self-contained arcs, which players can access at their leisure through a branching mission system. Since most missions unlock new units and can give you new technology, you can always drop a difficult mission and come back later after getting some new toys to play with.

Gone are the mission-to-mission item collecting and hero-leveling aspects. Instead, each mission grants you a number of credits and research points based on your performance. You can use the credits to upgrade your units with unique advantages and abilities, and to hire mercenaries (which, instead of appearing as a handful of units you can grab from camps in specific maps, become available as a limited number of expensive, elite units you can instant-drop from your mercenary center in every map. The research points add even more variety to the game, offering a pair of upgrade trees that offer unique units and army upgrades. Each upgrade tree offers two choices on each tier, forcing you to choose between, for example, a powerful anti-infantry robot unit or a massive troop transport that instantly deploys its payload.

Since the upgrades and mercenaries remain consistent throughout the game after you buy them, there's less uncertainty about wasting your money like in Warcraft 3. It also helps make each mission feel like it's part of a storyline in a consistent universe, and not just a string of maps upon which to wage war.

The multiplayer drops the RPG elements and replaces them with a meticulously balanced full-scale war between three unique factions. This is what will have the players coming back to Starcraft 2 months and years after they wrap up the single-player campaign. Out of the box, Starcraft 2 comes with plenty of maps and game modes, ranging from 1v1 to 4v4 ranked matches to cooperative fights against the AI. That's only the tip of the online gaming iceburg, though.

Like the first game, Starcraft 2 includes a map editor. Casual modders can use it to make fresh multiplayer maps using all the resources of the game itself. Hardcore modders can use it to make fresh games in the Starcraft 2 engine. The Galaxy Editor has already been used to make tower defense custom game modes, and was used by Blizzard to create the bonus "Lost Vikings" shoot-em-up game in the single-player campaign (click on the arcade cabinet in the cantina). Battle.net is certain to get new and unique game types as modders become more comfortable and creative with the editor.

As I write this, at 2:50 a.m. EST, there are currently half a million players on Battle.net, running over 44,000 Starcraft 2 games. This is well into late night/early evening, and is definitely an "off hour" for the game. Those are pretty impressive numbers, as is the 3 million copies of the game sold within 1 month. Okay, it's not Modern Warfare 2 popularity (that game sold 4.7 million copies within 1 day), but PC gamers are a much more patient and deliberate lot. Long after the MW2 fans move on to Halo Reach or Medal of Honor or Call of Duty: Black Ops, players are still going to come back to Starcraft 2. They stuck with the first Starcraft for over a decade, and the sequel either keeps or improves everything that was great about that game. RTS games last a very long time, and Starcraft 2 is the current king of RTS games.

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