StarCraft II Wings of Liberty

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is the second game in the StarCraft franchise to be released by Blizzard, and hit shelves for both Windows PC and Mac users in July 2010. The game stars Jim Raynor, returning from the first game and its expansion Broodwars, as the leader of a revolutionary group to combat the Dominion that rules in the area. He's soon joined by an old friend and convict, Tychus Findlay, who just made bail with the price of having to wear a huge ass armor suit wherever he goes. A whole new ballgame begins to be played as Sarah Kerrigan, a hybrid with human and Zerg DNA, leads a new swarm of Zerg across the sector to finish what she started four years ago during the Brood Wars.

The controls are pretty much the same from the first game, except this time we're offered tutorial videos to teach us the basics instead of an entire level dedicated to it, personally I find this to be an improvement as it shows you how to get started and eases you into the game a lot quicker.

Like most RTS games, we open up with a simple mission that doesn't require any structures building, just marching through the street with a unit taking the fight to the Dominion. As you advance through the game more structures and units will become available to you and the game offers a lot of freedom when it comes to its missions. While the designation remains the same, the journey can go different ways depending on your choices, offering you multiple missions that you can tackle in any order, and not all the missions can be played as one requires you to make a choice. This gives the game plenty of replay value as you mess around with different ways to go about the campaign.

Missions aren't always your basic build your own base and then attack the enemy's lingo. Certain missions are designed with a specific task in mind. As one such example we have the return of the Zerg Rush, where you have to hold your base from a Zerg invasion while waiting for a pick-up to arrive. Other Zerg missions include escorting a colony off a planet and defending your base at night while attacking the structures the Zerg took over in the day. The different mission objectives and the creativity that goes into them makes the game very engaging, and the characters are just as lively as ever. Only this time technology has improved so what they can do is doubled and the game takes full advantage of that.

Here we have the standard Command Center of the Terran faction. All three factions from the first game has returned for the sequels, and the game has the same number of units as the first game. To your left are construction vehicles and to your right are your standard foot soldiers used to send into battle. Every structure and unit has a health bar that appears when you click on it, the construction vehicles can be used to repair damaged structures while medics can be used to heal wounded men.

Your mission objectives will be listed in the top left corner of the screen along with any side missions available. When a character of importance speaks they're appear on the left hand side of the screen like shown above. The radar shows where enemies are on-screen, color coding threats from blue, yellow, and red.

At the bottom center of the screen will list your structures and units, the robot figure to the right of that is the Adjutant from the first game. Looking more robotic and less human this time around. Next to her is a list of actions that the particular unit can perform and structures that can be built when available. The blue crystals are the minerals next to the green gas used as currency to build structures and train units, and the minerals can run out prompting you to have to find a new field to take advantage of. Each faction has different variants, but the key points remain consistent.

In-between missions we're granted an interactive hub which allows us to get to know our main characters more, open up mission briefings, and check out the news reporting events that has transpired in the story. There's even music! You start out in just a bar at first, but after a couple of starter missions you'll move on to a ship. We also get a shooter mini-game in the form of an arcade that you can play any time during these periods of the game that feels like a real arcade. There's a lot of exploration and development in these scenes that I honestly wouldn't have expected coming out of a RTS.

The only real downside to the story is if you're not a fan of the franchise or familiar with the world it can be hard to follow. Especially if you haven't played Brood Wars. This is usually to be expected from sequels, but it's been twelve years since the last StarCraft game. That's a pretty long time to wait and a lot of new players would have cropped up by then. It's also a pretty long time to rely on memory.

The voice acting in this game is great. Everyone from the major characters to the minor characters have done an excellent job in bringing their character to life and pushing the story further. In the first game they managed to do great even in this area with less and now they've only gotten better with time.

I have no interest in ranked multiplayer gameplay so I won't be talking about it in this review.

If you love StarCraft, then you'll love this game. If you love RTS games in general then you'll be pleasantly surprised at what lengths the single campaign goes to give you a fun and enjoyable experience. StarCraft II takes everything that was great about the first game and expands upon it immensely. It's a must have for any StarCraft fan, and well worth the investment if you're a fan of the genre.

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