Friday, July 30, 2010

StarCraft 2: The Campaign

DID YOU KNOW? Turns out you cant get achievements if you are not logged in Battle.net!




Hey guys 4 days later and and awful lot of playing of Star Craft 2: Wings of Liberty i can finally write my review. Not that there was any doubt that this game will be AWESOME! But still from the first hour of playign i already wanted to talk about it.

So....i got back home on 27 july i open sadly my normal edition of the game and i start installing right away. While installing im enjoying the wonderfull re-cap of the original game and whats been going on that led to the story in SC2. the game is done installing i download the patches and quickly get started.
Now first what i wanna point out is that the game and the battle.net systems are integrated together! There is a offline mode which if you fail t o log in to the internet will be available but i havent tried it. The menu is absolutely gorgeous shit the whole design of the game and battle.net are amazing and just hype you upp straight away.
I ignored the online battles and jumped straight into the action.
Lucky for me i had alot of exp with the old SC and some other RTS games so i managed to pull everything pretty quick. Even tho there new units and stuff the game feels surprisingly the same. Mayeb i just spent too much time on it as a kid i dont know. But the same doesnt mean bad. The game rockz! on many levels.
The evolution of technology has allowed blizzard to do amazing things with the maps. And during the capaign there is a great sense of story progress and detail. Buildings and lying cars around. Ppl cowering in fear. Space stations...volcanic planets, jungles you get it all...and its EPIC!
Between missions you get to interact with some of the cast and get yourself involved with the story more deeply. I really feel sad for anybody who skipped talking and clicking around cuz you are just missing out on the whole thing...
You can upgrade your units and buildings and get some passive buffs for your army through research of Zerg and Protoss technology. Now those stuff are exclusive to the campaign but they are pretty cool and add a good sense of progress and even a small RPG element.
Altho for me the best choices were kinda obvious i suppose there are good sides of the upgrades i didnt pick.
On Hyperion your command center battlecruiser you also get an "archive" which gives you the ability to view all your mission progress and the option to replay or even try higher difficulty to get some achievements done. sadly i got disconnected couple of times during playing and didnt get achievements for alot of missions. Took me awhile to figure out that i need to be in Battle.net to get them. Which doesnt make sense to me....how come the game cant save the stuff you pulled off and then load them to battle.net? There is only 1 explanation....in online mode you probably cant use cheats ( i havent heard of any cheats beeing discovered yet) while in offline you probably can...if its not that then i hope blizz had a good reason to cripple ppl witheout internet connection (tho i suspect there wont be that many).
The cinematics....well.....nobody ever needs to say anyhing about the quality blizzard always delivers with its cinematics. Superb as always!
The story....now.....its pretty much a follout of what happened in SC 1 and the brood wars. we get some moving forward but not much. The great enemy......a hybrid race that created the zerg and protoss and wants to kill everybody in the universe....to think about it if they created the swarm and the protoss that doesnt make them Hybrid...cuz they came BEFORE the 2 parts....so the term is a bit wrong. at least from Xel`Naga point of view. I always imagined the Xel`Naga would be something else....so i was dissapointed when i learned what they truly were.
Overall the sotry quality is mediocre....but the way you get involved in it makes the game shine. Amazing gameplay and EPIC missions.....it just sucks you right into the action and leaves you breathless.
Since this is gona be a trilogy it wasnt a surprise the missions were concentrated on the Terran. the Protoss had a handful of missions...3...or was it 4? well just a couple. And you dont get to play the Zerg at all....which is an interesting choice....i personally dont mind it ...but for newcomers its gona be harder to get into the zerg in multyplayer witheout ever playing them in the campaign. Oh well....practice makes better i guess :D
Anyway...
In the end StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty lived up to the expectations and turned out to be a diamond. i suspect with its release the market will open up once again to RTS games.....after all blizzard just showed everyone how a RTS game should be made. Cuz trust me....no other RTS game can even be compared to SC2. Its THAT AWESOME!

After i finished the campaign i dived straight into the online battlefront and its super fun!
ive been neglecting my WoW priest alot ^_^ but hey...can you blame me?

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