In a medium of such rapid technological change as the video game, 12 years is a very long time. Though the last installment in the StarCraft series came out a week after the Game Boy Color, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty makes the concepts laid out in the original feel fresh by staying largely the same.
Blizzard Entertainment’s original StarCraft, released in 1998, is one of the bestselling computer games of all time. Wings of Liberty is the first installment in a sequel trilogy, focusing predominantly on the human Terran race, locked in an interstellar civil war.
The core mechanic remains the same: The player acts as a military commander for one of three species (the rebel human Terrans, the mutating Alien-esque Zerg Swarm or the hyper-advanced humanoid Protoss, each with its own unique style of play) and must build and maintain a base and army to complete objectives, hold a position or wipe the enemy off the map.
Finding and exploiting the advantages each race has over the others is part of the strategic element.
The gameplay in this installment is so similar to the first’s near-perfect formula that it almost doesn’t merit comparison. Old favorite units and buildings have been tweaked slightly, in ways that are either improvements or barely perceptible; the new meshes so well with the old that the sequel feels more like an extreme face-lift than full update.
Graphically, the game has moved forward nicely, with a wider color palette and richer textures, while character designs have moved slightly sideways toward exaggerated, cartoonish proportions. From the player’s zoomed-way-out vantage point, this graphic style makes it easier to tell things apart when chaos breaks out on the battlefield ““ easier, but not easy.
For players new to the series (or for whom it’s been a decade or so) the single-player campaign does a fine job of introducing units and demonstrating strategies for their use. And while the campaign earns incredibly high marks for gameplay, it is here that the game’s biggest fault lies too.
In updating StarCraft for today’s market, the developers seem to have put a huge emphasis on story in a genre that is simply not designed for it. From high up over the action, it’s hard for the player to develop an emotional connection with any of the 30 little marines he or she is sending straight into the charging Zerg horde. To combat this, the game’s story line is told through cinematic interludes between missions that feel shoehorned in. Despite the considerable production values of these story-advancing portions (for example, the Zerg Queen of Blades is voiced by “Battlestar Galactica” star Tricia Helfer), it seems that most of the money was spent on the impressive animation, and very little on script polish or hiring talented voice actors (Helfer’s performance is not memorable).
The story actually fits into the modern game mold quite well, in that it’s a painfully uninspired space opera full of silly names like “Arcturus Mengsk” ““ and he’s a human character. The civil war plot is lifted straight out of “Star Wars” and pits a ragtag bunch of grizzled, inexplicably Southern space marines against an oppressive authoritarian regime, on a spaceship with a motley crew of caricatures who poorly deliver bad lines.
Listening to each one-dimensional character explain the need to complete every new mission becomes tedious, and once the “advanced” Protoss enter the picture, it’s all over-serious fictional techno-religious blather and vaguely Aztec or Polynesian sounding nonsense names.
The original game got by on short snippets of talking-head dialogue between missions to give events a logical progression and explain what was at stake. Because the story was so unobtrusive, it was able to get away with being inconsequential. By placing the narrative front and center, StarCraft II draws attention to its blandness.
With gameplay this strong, all the tired spaceship banter in between is just unnecessary. Luckily, the meat of this title is well worth sitting through the dumb plot portions, and there are no story interruptions in the online multiplayer mode. Of course, the only players good enough to survive in multiplayer were going to buy the game regardless of this review.