Review: StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (BETA)

Introduction-

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is a military science fiction real-time strategy game currently under development by Blizzard Entertainmentas a sequel to the award-winning 1998 video game StarCraft. The game is being developed for concurrent release on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Currently the beta is available to play for anyone who pre-ordered StarCraft II. Blizzard has tried not to change too many basic features of StarCraft while making StarCraft II, and one of the biggest changes they had planned was shunned by the players, so Blizzard has their work cut out for them if they want to make an innovative game that can’t be too much different from StarCraft I.

The Good-

Some of the really good features of StarCraft II include the new graphics, smoothness of gameplay, and the online matchmaking system. I can’t tell you if the campaign is good yet, since they have not released it on the beta, but I can only assume it will be amazing. Originally, the updated graphics that Blizzard was trying to use was really hated by the players, so they had to make some tweaks to their looks to make the game look more like StarCraft I, while still looking new enough to be StarCraft II. I think they did a really good job at this, since the graphics look really nice, but you can still see that the game is StarCraft. The online matchmaking system they have is probably one of the best I have ever used. They have really narrowed down the differences in skill levels of opponents by having 5 different divisions (Copper, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum), and within your division you have a rank, which is all then used to match you with the closest match. You might think this would make matchmaking take forever, but it doesn’t! Usually my wait times are less than 10 seconds, and I am able to start new games constantly, it is truly a great system.

The Bad-

My main problem with StarCraft II is that there really is one very basic strategy that will win more than 75% of your matches, and that is the rush. Basically, all you need to do is build as many of the basic attacking units as you can (Marines, Zealots, Zerglings), and upon getting about 5-10 of them, rush them all to your opponents base and take him down, it is really that simple most of the time. I am amazed that this works so efficiently and requires so little skill, yet the game is supposed to be a “real-time strategy” game. To me there should be a lot more thinking involved in an RTS. My thoughts originally were that it would be changed, since this is only the beta, but Blizzard announced that their plan was for matches to last an average of 15 minutes. This means that they actually planned for rushing to win all the time, which really is disappointing. Blizzard took a lot of time building this game, and made elaborate end game units that cost a ton of supplies to make, but with all the rushing that takes place, more than 95% of your matches wont even see any of these units doing battle, which again is just disappointing.

Overall-

Overall I think that the system they used and the graphics are all really good, but the gameplay is not very fun. It is disappointing when a game takes so many years to be made yet is conquered by such a simple tactic as rushing. This definitely is the not the game I was hoping for, but hey, its just the beta, and hopefully some big changes can and will be made by launch time.