Hands-on with Stacraft's new singleplayer campaign.
When I first previewed Starcraft II's multiplayer action back in Issue 103, the game was as solidly built as the nearest all-brick steakhouse, and apart from a few niggles was masterfully well-balanced. But for some people multiplayer is only a small piece of the game (if indeed it registers at all).
Blizzard has decided to mix things up a lot with Wings of Liberty, and rather than including all three factions' campaigns they've chosen to focus completely on the Terran campaign alone. This might seem to be a step backwards (and for those who aren't quite as enamored with the plucky humans they might indeed hate it), but it places a razor-sharp focus on one side - and their story. I spoke to a dev at a recent event about the reason behind this, and he explained it as "there simply would not have been enough space to tell a cool story... enough space for a meaningful choice."
The singleplayer campaign picks up some years after the events in the Brood War expansion pack, reintroducing Jim Raynor as the leader of the Terran resistance against the Emperor (Arcturus Mengsk). His vessel and home is actually a Battlecruiser he stole from Mengsk, and in-between missions it acts as both a way of navigating the story of the game and a way of establishing a connection with the characters. You can chat to a battle-suited Marine on the bridge, chat with Mercenaries in the bar, talk about calculators with the plucky lab technician in the science bay or spend some cash on persistent upgrades with the lads in the engineering deck. Every choice you make on the ship affects the campaign from that point forwards; if you spend money to upgrade your units or structures after the third mission, you'll still have that same upgrade twenty missions later.
Each mission is presented to you as a request by a planetful of colonists, a treasure-hunting expedition from your old war buddy or simply as a result of the reinvigorated Zerg attack on mankind. The aggressive beasties have come back in force, and with any renewed Zerg presence the Protoss are sure to follow - throwing the whole universe into chaos once again. You're given a choice of missions to complete at any given time, and while the ultimate storyline is linear the order of the missions is not. As each mission unlocks one specific and unique unit (and pays a different amount of money), and is crafted to take advantage of the strengths of that particular unit, the choice really is up to what seems most interesting or useful at the time. Units that couldn't make it into multiplayer (simply because they're not used) are the stars of the singleplayer campaign, bringing back Medics, Firebats, Goliaths and even Wraiths. Each have been tweaked to make their particular abilities even more specific, and the levels really reward playing around with different combinations of units to achieve goals - simply building a lot of Marines will merely be burning cash and wasting resources.
The challenges presented in each mission are wildly different to the usual RTS fare; like a mission to a world to mine crystals located on low-ground with a base on high-ground, and a five-minute looping cycle cleansing anything on low-ground with burning hot lava. Crystals collected have to be used to train units, and there is not enough around the base to hit the goal - forcing you to expand, at the cost of expending units.
Included with the campaign will also be achievements that give amusing or difficult goals for specific difficulties, as well as plenty of hidden content that can only be found by searching for it. This really does seem to be a singleplayer campaign done with impressive style, and will surely tempt those looking for more story than the typical 'build-base-kill-them-rinse-repeat' RTS games of yesteryear.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012