StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Review (PC)

“Hell, it’s about time.”

Now that i’ve got little cliché out of the way, I can finally talk to you fine folks about StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty; the first of three in the branching epic. It’s taken twelve years for the people to finally get their hands on the sequel to one of the greatest RTS’ of all time, and although people may remark about how long it’s taken, it doesn’t seem to me that there has been a wait at all. The first StarCraft, despite its age, is still one of the most played strategy games around – especially in Korea, where they take this game incredibly seriously. We have professional footballers – they have professional StarCraft players. The feeling of having to wait for this game only came around since they announced it some time ago. With the Terran-based Wings of Liberty released, the real wait (for me) comes with the second and third StarCraft II titles; the Zerg focused Heart of the Swarm, and the climactic Protoss centered Legacy of the Void. Anyhow, I digress. Wings of Liberty really has been worth the wait. It’s a fantastic meld of old and new. With so many developers trying new things, and so they should, Blizzard stuck with their guns on this one and produced a strategy game that is a must play for everybody.

Ah, Battlecruisers. There ain't nothing you can't do.

If you’ve played either the original StarCraft, or any of Blizzard’s other RTS series, WarCraft, you’ll feel fairly comfortable playing Wings of Liberty right from the start. Typically, you start with a town hall-esque building, create workers from there, and proceed to erect unit-producing buildings to build up an army while you collect a steady stream of resources. In StarCraft’s case, these resources are minerals and a nice green substance called vespene gas. If you strip everything apart and look at this game’s bare bones, the object is to basically out-build your opponent. Gather resources, build buildings, research upgrades – all to overpower your opponent and ultimately craft a better army than them. When you start to look at the game in depth, though, you’ll realise that StarCraft II is a lot thicker in depth than you might have originally thought. With returning units in the game, as well as new ones (and some taken out entirely), this isn’t quite the StarCraft you know, but it really isn’t far from it. It does look a lot nicer though, by the way. There are three races to the game too, all returning – the human mechanical giant Terran, the ancient laser-donning Protoss, and the squelchy crunchy creepy crawly Zerg. The armies are designed in such a way that each army can accomplish the same things, but in different ways, and they each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Mastering each of the races comes a long way when you hit the extremely competitive multiplayer, even if you just learn what the other races can do, and not how to play them.  But more about this sort of thing later – all of that i’ve just said really is only important in the multiplayer, and Wings of Liberty has a fabulous single-player campaign.

Originally, StarCraft II was going to be just one game. It would have three campaigns – a Terran, a Zerg, and a Protoss campaign respectively. When the decision to make a three-parter of sorts, each one focusing on each of the races, Blizzard got some stick from the fanbase. But I think this only helps the games credit. It allows for the game to go deeper with it’s characters, and it’s story. Many remember characters like Jim Raynor, Sarah Kerrigan, and Zertatul from the first game, but from playing Wings of Liberty alone, I already feel like I know these characters a lot better – especially Jimmy. Speaking of which, faces old and new will come up during the story, and you’ll even get a flashback cinematic part way through the game. This scene even has the exact same lines from the first game, just re-recorded. You’ll be following James Raynor and his path for vengeance against the corrupt Terran Dominion, and his old comrade-turned-nemesis Arcturus Mengsk. If that wasn’t enough, Raynor’s also fighting himself over what happened to his old flame, Sarah Kerrigan. Left for dead by Mengsk in the events of the first StarCraft, she was turned into the Queen of Blades, and she now leads the Zerg swarm, and Jimmy, of course, feels responsible. Throw an ancient alien prophecy into all that, and you get a very compelling story with a variety of characters, old and new, with every line of dialogue and every plot point feeling one hundred percent necessary and well thought out. Sure, the story might sound like a mess here, but the game certainly does a lot better job of explaining it to you than I do.

This is Jimmy.

Since you’ll be playing as the Terrans all the way through Wings of Liberty, besides a miniature Protoss campaign, the level design is a lot more unique, as well as the writing. Instead of the standard formula, that featured prominently in the first game, of ‘build units, send there, kill stuff, win’, the campaign can focus on interesting ways to make each mission different. Throughout all of the campaign, I can only think of two missions that were somewhat similar, but I still enjoyed them thoroughly. No sense of repetition here. The level design takes advantage of the fact that the player is controlling the Terrans – for example, one mission requires you to use the Terran-only ability of lifting off your buildings and relocating them, because the planet you’re on is slowly being demolished due to a star going supernova, and you have to constantly move your base around and survive. On top of that, you’ve got to build a suitable army to take out an enemy force and reach your objective. Exciting stuff.

Outside of the missions, you’ll be presented with a hub world of sorts, which is primarily set on the Terran battlecruiser Hyperion. You can move to several points on the ship and talk to a variety of crew members between missions, as well as research upgrades which are unique to the single-player. The writing really does shine here, as well as in the many cutscenes, both in-game and rendered, that you’ll see along the way. Like I said – a testament to why this game is better of with having only one main campaign and not three. Decisions have to be made along the way, often changing who stays on your ship or not, as well as what units you take with you through the rest of the game. Units are also introduced to you at a good pace, with a lot of the missions focusing for at least a little while on one new unit the game provides you with. The first time you get access to the powerful Siege Tank, you are told of its ability to deploy into siege mode, and are given the perfect opportunity to see why you’d want to do this. Deploy it at higher ground, and watch the Protoss units below you blow up before they can get anywhere near you. By the end of the single-player, you have a wide variety of units to choose from (some of which are specific to the campaign, as well as some that are old favourites removed from the multiplayer), and you don’t feel like any of them are useless in anyway. The game shows you how to use them without keeping you on a leash, so you still feel in control, and in the know.

Ah, the Hyperion. I've never enjoyed not being in a mission so much.

The single player specific upgrades I mentioned are quite varied, and add some interesting decision making to be done in the already compelling story. With the unit specific upgrades, the only decision to be made is which one to purchase first. These are purchasable from the armory, which over time, houses some of the units you unlock. Clicking on one of the units you can see in the hangar gives you information on them, further expanding the games rich detail. However, that are scientific upgrades too. These are earned by completing  secondary objectives, primarily, and branch off in two trees, Zerg and Protoss research. In each tree, after so many points have been acquired, there are two options available to you. When you pick one, the other is unattainable for the rest of the game, so you really have to consider which matches your playstyle the most. For instance, do you want the ability to generate vespene gas 25% faster, or to be able to simply call in supply deploys from the air instead of having to build them. Personally, I went with the latter.

Both in-game and CG cutscenes look great. This is an in-game one, by the way. In case you're confused.

To think, we haven’t even gotten around to talking about the multiplayer yet. This is where StarCraft will be most familiar, because it’s pretty much that same game you played twelve years ago. Some units have been taken out, with other new units added in. In fact, the only notable difference from the first game, besides race and unit specific changes, is that you don’t have to send your worker units to individual mineral nodes. You can simply set a rally point to any mineral node, and that worker unit will pick one of the mineral veins by itself, depending on how many workers are already on it. This may sound minor, but it makes the game move just that little bit faster. So like I said, not much has changed, but the game is still as complicated as ever. In a fun way, though. I’ll admit I was positively terrified of playing this game online, and I still am, especially after being put into the top league available after my placement matches. I don’t belong there. You pick a race, after hopefully doing a bit of research and practice into whether or not that is the race for you, and you go. Mastering each units key strengths and weaknesses, both of your own race and of your opponents, is essential. Sending an army of marines toward a group of Protoss colossi is a really dumb idea, and if you don’t already know that, well, that really is going to be a wake up call. You need to know this game fairly well to be successful at it, and listening to some of my more proficient friends talk about the game, I feel like I really don’t know much, but I still do alright. The more you learn, the more rewarding the game gets. Especially when that knowledge is being turned into victories. If you’re anything like me, you will lose a lot at first, but you won’t really care. Sure, there will be a bit of moping around afterwards, perhaps even rage, but you’ll dive back in and find that, whether you meant to or not, you’re a better player. StarCraft II’s multiplayer is a very rewarding experience, to say the least.

I believe I mentioned something called ‘placement matches’? Let me go ahead and explain. Thanks to Blizzard’s new Battle.net, Wings of Liberty has a full ranking system behind the multi-player. When you first log in, you’ll be able to play in fifty practice league matches. These are unranked, and are played on modified versions of standard maps to prevent early rushes, as well as the game speed being decreased a notch. This is so you can, well, practice – learning build orders, what units are good against what, and so on. After the practice league, or if you just skip it at any time, you are then given five placement matches. Depending on whether you win or lose these matches, which are against players of varying skill levels, as well as other statistics like how long those matches lasted, you will be placed in one of four leagues. Bronze, silver, gold, or platinum. There is a diamond league also, but that is only reachable by climbing through the ranks of the platinum league, if you get there. On a personal note, I think i’m pretty bad at this game so far, as i’ve never been great at strategy games, but my placement matches still put me in the highest league it possibly could – platinum. I think this is purely down to the amount of players ranked at the moment, or something, and no doubt it’ll work a lot better in the future. This has lead me to just constantly lose my matches over and over, and is especially amusing as a friend of mine, who plays Zerg and is three hundred percent better than me, only reached the ilver league after his placements, and has since climbed to gold.

You get a nice breakdown after each match. Statistics you didn't even know you cared about are there, too.

Battle.net also supports cross-game friends lists, so you can see your friends playing World of Warcraft, and eventually, Diablo III, even message them. Each player has his or her own rather detailed profile, giving both information on how their doing in their leagues (be it 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4 etc), as well what achievements they have acquired in both single-player and multiplayer. Portraits are rewarded for earning achievements, either tied to single-player or multiplayer. Sadly, the majority of portraits require a high number of wins to unlock. Want to have a portrait of the Queen of Blades? You’d best go and win one thousand matches in 1v1 as Zerg, then. Ah well, i’m sure it’ll only be a matter of time before someone hits that. I wouldn’t even be surprised if it had already happened.

I’d just like to state how hard it was to not ramble on to some ridiculous degree about StarCraft II. There’s a lot in this game to explore and talk about, and i’ve probably said too much already. Whether you’re a fan of strategy or not, you owe it to yourself to play this stellar strategy game. We waited twelve years, and Blizzard did not disappoint. Come on, there’s something to be said for a game that remains just as fun the more you lose. Don’t let the learning curve stop you like it did me at first – it’s a rewarding, grand play experience, with a gripping single-player campaign to boot.

Oh yeah, it looks pretty good, too. Didn’t even have to mention the visuals to tell you how good this game is. Now that should tell you how awesome it is, if nothing else has.