(These reactions are based on the single player campaign of StarCraft II.)

In case you are not aware, StarCraft is very popular; it is not jokingly called the national sport of Korea for no reason. When the original game arrived in 1998, it was, in many ways, a huge step forward for the RTS genre.  Three well-balanced factions, intriguing characters and storyline, and a slick interface all combined for a game that was accessible, fun, and an instant classic.  Having excellent competitive multiplayer didn’t hurt either, and that alone has kept the title alive for the past decade plus.

Everyone knew that a StarCraft II was inevitable.  Most of us did not realize it was going to take twelve years to get one.  So now that it has finally arrived, the obvious question is: was it worth the wait?

Space Opera

The original StarCraft is well known for being split into three campaigns, each focusing on one of the three factions: Terrans, Zerg, and Protoss.  The story follows a very epic arc from the first arrival of the Protoss and Zerg in human space, through the overthrow of the Confederacy and betrayal of Jim Raynor and Kerrigan, off to the efforts of the Zerg to destroy their hated enemies the Protoss, and finally to the Protoss trying to recover from the loss of their homeworld and continued efforts to eradicate the Zerg. There is a large cast of characters, unexpected twists and turns, and a sweeping feeling of being part of something larger.

Blizzard caused something of an uproar when they announced that StarCraft II would not be a single release, but instead that there would be three games – one per faction – released one at a time, starting with the Terran episode. In order to experience the entire SC2 story, you’d have to buy all three. Players were worried that they would only be getting 1/3 of a game for the price of a full game, but Blizzard assured us that each release would be a self-contained game unto itself.

StarCraft II picks up four years after the events of the original game’s expansion pack, Brood War, and includes characters and references events from both the pack and the subsequent novels.  If you are not that dedicated a fan and have never played the expansion or read all the novels, don’t feel too bad: you’ll pick it up soon enough.

In this first episode, Jim Raynor is still an outlaw, gunning for revenge against the now-emperor Arcturus Mengsk.  With his incredibly well-armed band of rag-tag rebels, Raynor cruises the edge of human space defending the little guy and striking out at Mengsk whenever he can.  When his old (imprisoned) buddy Tychus Findlay shows up with a plan for stealing alien artifacts to raise cash for their army, the plot thickens.  As Raynor begins to collect the artifacts, he discovers that both the Queen of Blades (the Zergified Kerrigan) and the Protoss have an interest in them.

The story is told through between-mission cut scenes, as well as in-mission conversations.  Most of the heavy lifting is done in the cut scenes, or during conversations between missions on board the Hyperion, which are lovingly rendered in great detail. You might be so taken with the shiny graphical touches that you might not notice how completely trite the actual dialog is.  Gruff people say gruff things, spooky people say spooky, cosmic things. Everyone acts pretty much exactly how you would expect based on their character model.

There are, in essence, a few sub-plots wrapped around the main arc of the story that can be played out by selecting different mission branches. One thread involves saving a group of colonists from the Zerg, and then helping their scientist leader to develop a cure for Zerg infestation; another involves helping a mercenary Spectre in his personal quest for vengeance against Mengsk as well.  The branching mission structure is interesting, and it gives you some strategic considerations regarding what order to take things in (do you go play a mission for more credits to unlock new weapons, or a research mission for better tech?), but it lacks overall cohesiveness from a story standpoint.  In the mission chain about dethroning Mengsk, you eventually expose him as an evil man, and it shows waves of dissent and rioting spreading across the empire. Yet, once that mission chain is over, the effects of your actions are absent in the story.  In the main storyline, it might as well not have even happened.  And depending on what order you take missions in, your supporting cast can be ready to desert you in one cut scene, but praising your brave leadership in the next.  The branching, ultimately, is a gameplay device and not a story device. It gives the player a false impression of having some impact on the narrative, which they quickly realize they do not.

Man on a Mission

So, while the overall story may be some classic space opera cliche (find the alien artifact to solve our problems!), most people are far more interested in fighting.  Playing a battle in SC2 is immediately familiar to anyone who played the first one.  For that matter, it should be immediately familiar to anyone who has ever played an RTS in the last ten years.  The UI is very clean, units are large and distinct, and navigating around the battlefield is a breeze.  The basic principals of play are the same as they ever were: gather resources, build buildings, spew out units.

The units and buildings that are available to you during any given mission are determined by two things: the research/purchasing you have done off-mission, and the particular focus of whatever mission you are on.  The research/purchase phase takes place between missions on the Hyperion, where you can use the credits you’ve gathered to buy improvements to all your units and structures (burst damage for your Viking’s missiles, for instance) or to spend your accumulated research points on new projects.  Research points are usually gained through bonus objectives during missions, and players must make a choice between techs at each of the tiers; selecting to give your bunkers better armor would preclude you from getting automated refineries, for instance.

The missions themselves, it must be said, do maintain a nice level of variety.  These are not the standard “build up a massive army and overwhelm the other base” type missions – each one has a unique objective and unique circumstances.  If you’ve been paying attention to the pre-launch hype, I’m sure you’ve already heard about the lava mission, where liquid hot magma pours over the low parts of the map every few minutes, or the “zombie” mission where you have to hold out in your base by night, and saunter out during the day to slaughter infested nests.  Keeping this level of variety across twenty-five missions or so is an impressive feat, and it certainly keeps the game from bogging down like many RTSes tend to.  One of my personal favorites involves intercepting cargo trains under increasingly heavy guard.

My main problem with the missions, though, is that (as mentioned above) each has a “focus.”  By that, I mean that almost every mission introduces a new unit, and is then accomplished through judicious use of that unit.  In the “zombie” mission, you get Hellions that have the speed and power to get out, destroy nests, but still get home safely by nightfall.  In the train mission, you get the speedy run-n-gun Diamondbacks, which are the only unit fast enough to keep up the assault on the trains.  By keeping each mission so individually focused, all the way until the final mission, the player is pretty much handed the keys to victory from the start of every mission. Building a lot of the unit in question and then going about your objectives leads to easy victories.  Yes, going for achievements and bonuses can change that focus slightly, but those are optional things that are outside of the “core” gameplay.

Additionally, because of the branching nature of the missions, you will often be given a unit in one mission, only to not have it available in the next.  I was given siege tanks as I proceeded down one branch of missions, but when I jumped over to a different track, I suddenly no longer had access to them.  This is necessary to maintain the careful structure of each mission, but it feels like a cheap design trick to keep things moving smoothly. This slow trickle of units means that it’s not until the last two missions or so that you actually have access to the entire array of units and structures available; Battlecruisers don’t show up until you are just about at the climax of the game, and your time with them is very limited.

Spit and Polish

Overall, StarCraft II is probably one of the slickest, smoothest games you’ll have the chance to play this year.  That is to be expected, I would say, when you’ve had twelve years to develop it and a budget purported to be larger than the GNP of several small nations.  Underneath all of that polish, though, SC2 is almost identical to its twelve-year-old predecessor, and whether that is a good thing or a bad thing depends entirely on your attachment to the original.  For me, while I enjoyed the variety of missions and accessible gameplay, I found the slow pace of unit introduction tiresome, and the inconsistent nature of the branching story a little weak.  Whereas StarCraft was a shining example of what RTSes could be, StarCraft II is merely shiny, showing little movement forward despite over a decade of genre advances in between.  With two more episodes yet to come, it’s hard to say what Blizzard will pull out of their hats.

The game is fun, of that there is no question.  I suspect pretty much anyone who plays it will enjoy it. In that way, it is very like the blockbuster movie Blizzard seems to have been trying to emulate: enjoyable, but ultimately shallow. Lots of one-liners and posturing, but nothing that anyone is going to think too hard about after the credits roll.  As a repackaging of the original, this first installment hits all the marks.  As a redefinition of the genre, though, it falls far short.