StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is a real-time strategy game in which you control an army, improve your forces, and attack and destroy your enemies. In Wings of Liberty, you control the Terran forces and fight against the evil Imperials (also Terran), as well as the two alien species: the Protoss and the Zerg. In the following two add-on campaigns slated for StarCraft II, you will have the chance to go through Zerg and Protoss campaigns.
For the uninitiated, the Protoss are an extremely powerful alien species that focuses heavily on honor, hand-to-hand combat and powerful cloaking technology. The Zerg are an alien race similar to gigantic insects with huge dark carapaces, coated in copious slime, and functioning under a hive-mind or “queen” of their colonies.
If either of these species, (not to mention our stellar colonial marines rebelling against the evil Empire) may seem like a rip-off of some classic sci-fi movies of the past, be it Aliens, Predator or Star Wars, well, there’s a reason for that. The creators have deliberately dipped into those films for savvy one-liners and clever dialogue to give the game a sense of humor and proportion. Clicking a unit will give a normal response. Clicking the unit over and over draws out somewhat ridiculous and hilarious responses often taken directly from the above-mentioned movies. None of this is new for fans of the first game, and after seeing preliminary trailers, I assumed StarCraft II would be nearly identical to what I encountered so many years ago.
I am pleased to say I was completely wrong.
StarCraft II continues the same epic storyline of the original, but the adventure has been catapulted ahead several years from the last chapter of Brood Wars. We see the gruff, but compassionate leader of a self-styled rag-tag band of rebels who is now rallying his forces to assist colonials from the political oppression or outright neglect from the dictatorial emperor. Falling in behind the former colonial marshal-turned-freedom-fighter is a cigar-chomping colonial marine sergeant (recently escaped from prison), the pilot and commander to the emperor’s flagship who has defected with his entire crew and vessel to your side, a grizzled one-armed mechanic who keeps your weapons hot, and a proto-psychic assassin who has gone rogue and joined your merry band with his rifle and voodoo trances that give him visions of what’s to come.
If it seems as if I’m spending more time describing intriguing characters and their potential plot hooks, well, there’s a reason. In a typical RTS game, most people prefer to simply go online and battle against, or join with, friends for mass combat. In previous RTS games, the campaign mode is just like reading a dull textbook before you get the chance to have fun and kill things.
StarCraft II is the first RTS game that I have played (and I’ve played many) in which this is not the case.
As the campaign moves forward, you are forced to choose which mission you will accept. At first, I presumed it wouldn’t matter; if I chose one mission, I would play the other one next and, in the end, play every mission available. This is not the case. There are many instances in the game in which you, the player, are given a choice between one path or another. Will you side with colonial settlers who are going to be eliminated by an alien armada, or will you side with the alien armada and help kill the encroaching colonials?
Each decision has its pluses or minuses, but once you select an option, you are locked in. And there are many choices you need to make as the campaign progresses. This new addition to the campaign mode creates a near “choose-your-own adventure” style to an otherwise flat story and breathes a new dynamic into a typically standard RTS module. But plot hooks and development are not the only selection of choices you make in StarCraft II. Each mission you accept has potential advantages in which you can earn credits or research points.
Credits are essentially cash bounties you receive on certain missions that you can use to purchase upgrades for your troops, vehicles and structures as well as hiring professional mercenaries willing to join your crew. If you choose to hire mercenaries, you will find no new “type” of unit you can’t already recruit, but the mercenary units who choose to work with your regular troops are typically stronger, faster, tougher and more deadly than their generic counterparts.
I discovered as the game progressed, however, that I could not afford nearly half of the upgrades to weapons, armor, technology or mercenary groups available. In other words, even if you can collect as much money as possible, you still are forced to make choices about what groups you wish to improve or upgrade and are often forced to skip out on vital or exciting upgrades due to a lack of funds. So once again, I felt like I had more control over the direction of the game and its development as I had to make choices on even what weapons and gear my men used.
With regards to choices and control, we now come to the last advantage you can earn: research points. On board your flagship in the laboratory, your top scientific minds are working with captured alien technology and life forms. As your scientists discover more about the strange evolutionary paths of these species, you are able to utilize their technology and merge it with your own.
Before you can unlock the secrets of alien DNA, you will need to collect alien artifacts, complete “snatch-and-grab” missions, and often capture or rescue alien life forms. Each of these goals you complete gives you “research points.” When you gain enough points, you can “buy” a new alien upgrade. But again, you are forced to decide between tantalizing alternatives.
You must peruse your options and carefully select which technological evolutionary path is most in sync with your combat style. Do you want stronger firepower for a hard-charging marine or better armor for a slow, yet already powerful, tank? It’s up to you, but again, once you decide, there can be no turning back.
With all the great elements of choices and characters, I was distressed to see much of the acting of our main character to be rather flat and somewhat one-dimensional. His tone, his attitude and his reflections seemed to lack depth and clarity. I often had trouble sympathizing with his lamentations. Woe that they could not cast Nathan Fillion to play this role — he was made for it.
Instead, I found myself more interested in the supporting cast. From the attractive scientist who craves your “firm support” to the rough-around-the-edges dialogue that spits from the mouth of your ol’ riding buddy the former marine sergeant to the mutton-chop whiskers that dance over the upper lip of your slap-happy mechanic, each character was tremendous fun to me. In fact, I was more captivated by the story and characters than many of the actual battles.
The pacing itself was certainly fun and interesting throughout much of the campaign mode. But during the actual combat missions it was broken up with the same quasi-rock style music found in the original series. Listening to the off-key wailings of a guitar riff simply does not inspire me to crush my enemies and see them driven before me. In fact, I found it distracting, and but for the humorous one-liners of the troops themselves and their warnings on when they were getting attacked, I would have opted to simply mute the volume and play some John Williams.
I find it to be interesting that the music was so clearly blasé in the actual combat missions as the designers seemed to take a great relish in giving me excellent sound options in the story mode. For example, when you are navigating your vessel between missions, you may choose to enter the area called “The Cantina,” the bar in which you and your cronies hang out, drink and catch up on rumors. While you bump into wandering rogues who give you data over the cheap swill that passes for a cold beer on your rig, you have the option of playing the jukebox. The jukebox itself has dozens of songs on it, and every time you select the jukebox, it will play a new song. From Sweet Home Alabama to other more eclectic songs, the feeling of being in a beat-up bar is brought home very well with the music. It was therefore distressing that the creators of the game didn’t take more broad liberties with the music rights they secured and utilized better songs for the game’s fight scenes (though “Terran Up the Night” was a great song to close the credits with).
Regarding the battles themselves, the games developers clearly attempted to placate the fans of the first game by keeping to the original combat style in StarCraft. I feel this was a disservice. RTS games have come a long way in the past several years, and since the first StarCraft hit shelves, subsequent games have given players more direct control over formation, strategies and fighting styles for their units. StarCraft II kept things simple and consequentially somewhat boring. By adding more tactical commands, I think the game could have had a richer and more detailed set of playability without sacrificing the spirit of the game.
Aside from the campaign mode, you could select online combats. Here, you are pitted against players who are matched with your skill level. Your skill level is determined by how many missions you won in the campaign mode and on what difficulty levels you won them. In the campaign mode, you can select a difficulty level for each mission you fight. Whether you complete a mission on Easy or Expert doesn’t matter much, as the story goes, but it does affect your ranks. When you play against players online it pits you against players of equal level based on these ranks.
Though I anticipated an heroic bout in which my stalwart forces crushed computer foes or teamed up with friends to “Cry, havok!” I was frustrated to see that many of the units I had worked with and played with were unavailable. For example, one of the more useful units for the Terran forces is the medic, who can almost instantly heal your colonial marines and has saved my butt many times over.
In the multiplayer games, I could not recruit the medic or other units, such as the firebat, a close-quarters unit with a flamethrower who is excellent at killing massive amounts of enemies at short range. As for the technology that I had spent hours unlocking in the campaign mode, some of it was there for my choosing while others were completely unavailable. This is a bit of a problem, because if you are prepared with specific and interesting strategies to win the game that you learned in the campaign mode, well, you will need to unlearn what you have learned in the multiplayer game.
The only true complaint I had (other than some of the acting of the cast during story mode or the somewhat dull music in the combat missions) was the difficulty in being able to select specific units quickly and efficiently. Because they moved so fast on the map, it was often hard to target a specific unit, and in a RTS game, seconds can make a large difference in combat.
Ultimately, I believe that StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty was superior to the first games, and I look forward to the sequels with relish. The story mode was what really kept me hooked, as opposed to the linear strategic patterns that my troops had to work with. I hope, as the add-ons come out, you have the option to use more creative tactics during battles than the usual, but I do not believe that will happen. Meanwhile, while I wait for the sequel, I am more excited about replaying the entire campaign than simply playing battle maps. This time, I will be making new choices and selecting different missions for my men. Will I turn my back on the infected colonists? Will I unite my troops with an alien fleet against my own people? Of course, only time will tell, and in the coming weeks, I look forward to the chance of discovering new stories and missions in the game I’ve already won but have in no way finished.
I thoroughly enjoyed playing StarCraft II. I believe that even if you aren’t a fan of the standard RTS games that it is still worth playing simply for the story and the development of the game. Meanwhile, any fan of RTS should definitely check it out, as it has clearly breathed life into a great genre that has lately been growing somewhat stale. In the end, I was given the chance to relive a classic game with a new twist, and it brought a lot of nostalgia and good memories back to me of clobbering buddies over the ’Net during my college years. Revisiting any classic is worth it, be it a novel, a song or a videogame. For that reason alone I’d urge you to buy it, not to mention all of the fun it will offer to the next generation of gamers who missed out on the original.
Oh, and one other thing, bub; after you buy it, look for me online under “Dain.” I’ll be waiting for you, if you got the guts to take me on.
