Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty review

The hub of all things
The entire prosecution from the campaign, short of the first few missions, is your own personal Battlecruiser, which boasts four locations to visit and control your campaign - the armoury, the cantina, the lab, and the bridge. Between these locations you can spend cash to improve your troops and buildings, unlock new research options, or hire mercenaries.

Even before you get on the battlefield, good choices will shape how you play, and enhance the game styles you favour.

For instance, if you like turtling behind a ring of turrets, you'll want to spend money on boosting their capacity, and buy an autogun upgrade. Of course, this is at the expense of other upgrades. Similarly, for every research item you unlock, another becomes unavailable.

You can also chat to any number of NPCs on the ship, unlocking various storylines and bits of game info. It's particularly fun to watch the news feed after every mission, to see what lies the Mengsk sponsored UNN is broadcasting about you.

The real meat of the game, though, are the missions themselves, and Blizzard's done a wonderful job of coming up with fresh and exciting missions to keep you pushing through the game. There are old favourites, like the "Hold out until" rescue mission that was so tense in the first game, to new missions that take advantage of the more robust new engine. In some, you must contest with a day/night cycle that changes unit behaviours, while in another early mission, lava regularly floods the low levels of the map. Deft timing, good use of choke points, and efficient resource spending is key.

The ebb and flow of the game is, however, more or less unchanged. The fact is, Blizzard got it right first time around, and Starcraft II harks back to that now classic formula. However, there are subtle changes to almost every aspect of the game that not only keep it fresh, but open up very interesting new options. Take the humble Supply Depot, for instance. This can now be raised and lowered into the ground, making it even more useful to use to build choke points around your base. It's this evolution of gameplay based on the habits of the best players in the original which has made Starcraft II such a natural and welcome progression.

And then there's Battle.net
This is something which is still bit of a sore spot however. The new Battle.net service really is slick, and it's integration with things like Facebook make hooking up with friends easier than it's ever been. But we still don't support Blizzard's decision to remove pure LAN-based gameplay.

For many, that's the one big memory of the original game. We know of some early home network setups that were rigged purely to support massive games of Starcraft (*waves at the old Copeland St Crew*). But that's gone now. Sure, we get one of the most in-depth Achievement systems we've ever seen, great social integration, and superlative league support and match-making... but we also now rely upon Blizzard up-time for any kind of multiplayer.

We've already experienced a couple of outages. This is always going to happen at launch, we admit, but it only highlights an issue not unlike the recent Ubisoft DRM woes - that basically, we're paying for a potentially handicapped product.

Those issues aside, Starcraft II multiplayer is like an entirely different game, and one that's near impossible to fully cover in such a small space. The depth of unit balance and tactical gameplay is arguably the deepest yet seen in any RTS, and we expect the entire flavour of the game to flow and change as new tactics are learnt and counters developed. Rest assured, whoever, that when it all comes together, this will be the new standard in competitive RTS play.

Starcraft II is, at the end of the day, one of the most polished games we've ever played - as it should be, given the effort of development. It's not perfect - Battle.net integration, lack of anti-aliasing, etc - but it is great. Now, excuse us, because we need to go see a man about a Zerg rush...