StarCraft II Review

Story by Adam Templeton 

| Published Sep 7, 2010

Blizzard Entertainment maintains a compelling modesty about its work, willing to cancel any game at any point if the pieces look like they won't fit together just so. Ultimately, the company's development cycle is some straight up hero's journey shit. There's a chance the departing game idea won't survive the excruciating trials ahead. But if it does, it returns something more than a video game, an experience purer and longer lasting than the fare offered up by competing studios.

Almost immediately after the success of the original “StarCraft's” expansion pack “Brood War,” rumors of the inevitable sequel circulated. But as the years dragged on and coalesced into a decade, some screamed foul play. They asserted “World of WarCraft” had killed “StarCraft 2,” flung its body into a ditch and then paid Blizzard to cover it up. Some 12 years later, those people were proven wrong – they also got they help they needed, since projecting personifications of video games into a complex murder plot is kinda fucked up.

Fanfare aside, “StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty” was almost unanimously worth the wait. But – aside from the fact its release probably signified a national holiday in South Korea – what do we make of it? Online play is as competitive as ever, which is to say I haven't won a single match against anything capable of passing a Turing test. The story's been curtailed, truncated to the tale of only one of the richly detailed universe's three alien races. However, Blizzard's promised gamers an eventual trilogy, and I'm inclined to believe them. Additionally, what narrative is in play remains excellent throughout, told in the way for which the medium is best suited.

Players slide into the boots of Jim Raynor, a hard drinking man whose job description defies tense. He was a marshal who became a terrorist who became a terrorist again while at the same time reverting back to a marshal. Also, Raynor was forced to watch from afar while the love of his life succumbed to the fury of a ravenous alien swarm, only to emerge from a xenomorphic cocoon some months later as a mutated abomination bent on the destruction of mankind.
He's still a little torn up about that one...
For those of you new to the StarCraft universe, it goes like this: There's the Terrans, twangy good ol' boys jettisoned to a galaxy far from Earth, i.e. humanity's interstellar penal colony. Then you have the Zerg, insectoid monstrosities controlled by the Queen of Blades, a femme fatale who used to be a Terran. And finally, the Protoss, highly advanced reptilian creatures whose entire existence seems a cautionary tale about the extremes of religious zealotry.

Oh... and they all hate each other.

This acrimony initially makes it easy to justify why the other races are constantly up in the Terrans' business – the humans intentionally defile some Protoss holy ground, and the Zerg are just the Zerg. But the plot twist later in the game that unifies all three species feels overplayed. Had the game come out soon after “Brood War,” the notion of former enemies teaming up to face a greater threat wouldn't have yet been trodden to death by modern sci-fi games. However, had “Wings of Liberty” come out close to a decade ago, it wouldn't look this good. So, moot point.

Anyway, unlike its predecessors, “Wings of Liberty” takes a more open-ended approach to storytelling. Now a gun-for-hire attempting to overthrow the totalitarian government he helped instate, Raynor spends the bulk of the game building up his army. You pick which missions to undertake from a constantly updating list, each job offering a new unit for its completion.

Occasionally, this sporadic approach to recruitment causes some inconsistency in your forces (I didn't build up a working fleet until the final third of the game), but the game boasts such an impressive system of check and balances that my lack of air power almost never became an issue. It seems like every strategy has at least two or three viable counters, so you almost never find yourself unfairly outgunned. The A.I., however, is no slouch, content to punch you as hard as it can in your e-penis, given the opportunity.

Also, the plot in “Wings of Liberty” is surprisingly well developed. Initially, I was afraid I'd seen all the choice cinematic bits in trailers, but I was jubilantly mistaken. In between missions, you also have the option of exploring Raynor's ship, chatting with other characters and unraveling the sinewy narrative threads Blizzard's become so adept at weaving.