Starcraft 2: The Single Player Perspective

( 3 Votes ) When talking about Starcraft 2, most people tend to speak mostly about the competitive gameplay. After all, the first Starcraft endured for more than a decade, overwhelmingly popular in every corner of the world, due solely to the quality of its competitive online games, right? The most important and enduring aspect of a Starcraft game must be the online gameplay, and everyone thinks so, right? Blizzard certainly seems to think so—but I don't. I don't think Starcraft was a classic because of its multiplayer aspect: I think Starcraft was a classic because it managed to merge a fantastically addictive, fun style of RTS gameplay with an engrossing, compelling—and emotional—narrative.

With that in mind, I would like to present a review of Starcraft 2 constructed along my own lines of thought: that it is the single-player experience that matters most. I believe the narrative is equally as important to a game as its gameplay. I believe Starcraft, and later Brood War, were both perfect examples of how to combine strong gameplay with strong narrative to create a thing greater than the sum of its parts, a thing that could live—and endure—for decades. With Starcraft being such a penultimate game, it's only fair to ask how Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty, a sequel more than a decade in the making, measures up.

So how does Starcraft 2 measure up? Not well.

Remember, because this review focuses primarily on the single-player experience, there will be mild narrative spoilers in the section, "The Single Player Narrative."

Gameplay:

When you get right down to it, Starcraft 2 plays virtually exactly like the original Starcraft. There are several alterations to the gameplay mechanics and presentation (you can now both zoom the camera and rotate the camera) but nothing too terribly groundbreaking. Many of the unit types and buildings will be immediately recognizable to veterans of the first game, even if you haven't touched it in years.

It may not look like Raynor, but it is. Kind of.

From the perspective on the online-player, there's a great deal of change to talk about: Starcraft 2 introduces a number of new units to the game, which alter the tactics involved in competitive gaming—not to mention new tech to research and new abilities to play with. But, really, that's all minutiae, and doesn't carry quite the same weight from the single-player's perspective. Suffice it to say that the core gameplay mechanics are perfectly polished, the maps are masterfully-crafted, and once you get down to playing a mission, you'll be loving every moment of it. You want perfect Blizzard-style RTS gameplay, you'll find it here.

The most appealing aspect of the gameplay can be found in the single-player campaign and solo challenges. These battles typically feature interesting and unique objectives and tactics, that help to ensure that each mission has a very specific feel, and keeps the game feeling fresh.  In one mission you are tasked with holding out a fortress against an enormous swarm of invading Zerg. In another, you are tasked with mining mineral despots from the floor of a canyon that periodically fills with boiling lava, incinerating any unit caught below. In another mission, you rob trains. There's a ton of variety, making the game a great deal of fun to play, even if you never venture online. We're talking missions so fun you'll play and replay them over and over again because they never, never get old.

Score: 100%

The Single Player Narrative:

WARNING! This section will contain vital plot spoilers to the games Starcraft and Starcraft: Brood War, as well as minor spoilers to Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty. If you wish to avoid spoilers, please skip this section and proceed immediately to the "Online Multiplayer & Custom Maps" section.

The original Starcraft was a fun game, to be sure, but where it really shone was the narrative. In the Terran campaign, you followed the story of Jim Raynor, a lawman on the remote Confederate world of Mar Sara. Faced with a Zerg invasion and no Confederate aid to be found, Raynor enlists in with the rebel group, Sons of Korhal, led by the charismatic, eloquent Arcturus Mengsk. Raynor eventually comes to share Mengsk's opinion of the Confederacy: it is a corrupt, ineffectual government that ought to be replaced. He becomes a revolutionary. He fights off the invading Zerg Swarm, befriends the Protoss, and is with Mengsk right up to the final assault on the Confederate capital. And there, and the end of the Terran campaign of the original Starcraft, we bore witness to one of the most memorable scenes in gaming history: the betrayal of Sarah Kerrigan. It was shocking, unexpected, and it kept all of us right at the edge of our seats.

And then we began the Zerg campaign, and she came back: perverted by the Zerg Overmind into a monster—the Queen of Blades. Those three characters—the ambitous Mengsk, the righteous Ranor and the tragic Kerrigan from the crux of Starcraft's narrative, and the narrative of the first sequel, Starcraft: Brood War. In Brood War, we saw Mengsk solidify his rule as Emperor of the Terran Dominion, and we saw Kerrigan rise to power, becoming the Queen of the Zerg and the most powerful person in the Starcraft universe. She was smart, she was sexy—and she was evil.  Starcraft and Brood War both provided gamers with an unforgettable narrative and timeless characters. For many long years we have been waiting for a true sequel, not for online play or updated graphics or new units, but simply because we want to know what happens next.

So what does happen next?

Well, after four years of silence, Kerrigan invades the Terran Dominion. A new swarm! A new epic war, right? Well, not really. In the single-player campaign, you really don't get too see much of Kerrigan's invasion: beyond the initial assault on Mar Sara, the new Swarm War is just sort of set aside. For all the fear and fury of a Zerg invasion, the actual narrative doesn't really deal with it much, or lend the conflict any tension. Most of the missions that do deal with the Zerg invasion simply involve rescuing a group of colonists—and even then, only a few missions of those actually involve fighting the Zerg.

And he's even less interesting than he looks.

That's really the biggest problem with Starcraft 2's narrative. The game opens with a Zerg invasion. It should be the perfect device to lend the story a lot  of urgency and tension to help push events along. But instead of fighting the Zerg, you spend most of your time going from planet to planet fighting other Terrans, or Protoss. What's even worse is that, in the middle of this violent invasion, Jim Raynor decides its the perfect time to fight against Emperor Mengsk—which, in terms of the narrative, means never actually fighting any of Mengsk's troops. It means fighting a whole lot of meaningless missions to earn money and gain allies for an eventual fight against Mengsk—essentially, it's just narrative filler. It soaks up time, but doesn't advance the story anywhere.

And what happens once you've gathered a lot of money and allies? You take down Mengsk. Or, rather, you watch Mengsk's government implode thanks to a television broadcasts. Yes, the ruthless Dominion Emperor has turned into little more than another inept tyrant. So Mengsk, too, gets shoved to the background. To where does the narrative turn now? To the Zerg invasion? To Kerrigan's plans? To whatever the hell the Protoss have been doing? Nope. There's this ancient artifact you see, that was broken into a bunch of different pieces, and you need to collect the different pieces.

Why?

Well, for money. Or something. The game is never really quite clear on why your doing what you're doing—but that, I suppose, is the very essence of filler. The entire game plays out like this: filler mission after filler mission. Of the 26 campaign missions, only 4 or 5 are directly tied to the main plot. Everything else could be ignored without greatly effecting the story being told. And once you cut through all the pointless excursions to look at the full narrative itself, you see something distinctly underwhelming. Things do pick up toward the end, but the actual finale itself is pretty cliched and very predictable: depending on how you feel about certain characters, you'll either love it, hate it, or just play Brood War again and try to forget it ever happened. Don't worry, I won't spoil it.

But, okay, I know what you're thinking here: plot ain't everything. True, it's not. A game can have a poor overall story, but still shine if it features engaging, interesting characters—just look at Mass Effect 2. Unfortunately, Starcraft 2 doesn't shine on this front, either.  Between missions, you get to explore your starship, the battlecruiser Hyperion, and speak to various members of your crew. It's a really cool concept, but it kind of falls flat once you realize that none of the characters are very interesting or compelling, and they rarely have anything to say worth hearing. The new characters, plainly, stink. Tychus Findlay, the marine in the opening cinematic, is particularly bland: he's a violent, inarticulate thug with the personality of a stump. He would be more at home in a generic shooting game than Starcraft. And the other new characters? There all very shallow, very generic archetypes who never get any real depth, don't have any impact on the story, and have very little dialog.

And what of the returning characters? They were so much fun to listen to in the first games, after all. Not so much any more. Mengsk, as I've said, is a non-entity, portrayed more as a bumbling fool than anything else. The only real presence he has in the game is when he appears on television for a press conference. For someone so articulate in the Starcraft and Brood War, the Arcturus Mengsk seen in Starcraft 2 sure does seem to have a lot of trouble putting together coherent sentences. The charisma is gone. The eloquence is gone. The manipulative nature of his personality, too, is gone. Mengsk comes across as little more than an irate old man with a southern accent. It's a shame. A crying shame.

And Raynor? He's become a generic space marine. Apparently his background as a backwater lawman wasn't interesting enough for Starcraft 2, so his history has been retconned. Raynor is now a gruff, former-outlaw. Yeah, he used to rob trains and murder folks. Oh—and he doesn't have much of a conscience, either. Raynor's personality is virtually non-existent: in Wings of Liberty, his only real defining character trait is that he's an alcoholic. And Kerrigan? Well... I won't touch on her. Suffice it to say that the changes to Mengsk and Raynor set a precedent that is not broken.

You may remember Kerrigan from Starcraft 1: but it's probably better if you don't.

In summary, the story behind Starcraft 2 is a shallow, uninteresting affair, inflated far beyond its worth. The narrative lacks both tension and direction, and the characters are generic and unsympathetic. While the actual missions in the game are a lot of fun, the narrative that links them all to each other is sorely lacking, and painfully insufficient compared to the stories told in Starcraft and Brood War.

Score: 20%

Multiplayer & Custom Maps:

Starcraft 2 changes a number of things when it comes to online play. Firstly, LAN games are out--so it's online multiplayer only. Huzzah. In game chat, too, is gone. Want to talk to your friend? You'll have to buy a mic. In terms of competitive gameplay, I imagine you can find pretty much everything you need: the menus are easy to navigate, it's easy to get into a ranked match, if a player exits a game you win by default, and so on and so forth. There are plenty of rankings to place in, and the game follows your win/loss stats to place you with other players of equal skill, which is a fairly nice feature. The game itself is perfectly balanced, though you'll find that very few players are able to properly utilize the Zerg. Naturally, the gameplay is all-but-perfect: but that's not the focus of this review, is it?

For the lone player, it's custom maps that matter most. In previous Blizzard games, most of the post-campaign fun was derived from user-created maps. Unfortunately, user-created content has been so popular in the past, that Blizzard now wants to make money from it, and at the same time exercise complete control over all user-created content. Thanks to those ambitions, they've managed to pretty much ruined the whole experience for most of us. Here's the problem:

Playing custom maps in a huge pain in the ass: the GUI is cluttered as hell, which makes even finding a custom map all-but impossible, and those custom maps you do find, you'll have to find from Starcraft 2's in-game browser. That's right, every single custom map you play, be it singe-player or multiplayer, must be downloaded from within the game. And don't think Blizzard will be at-all lax with the content they allow: already, mere weeks after the game's release, Blizzard has deleted vast quantities of maps deemed "offensive," or "inappropriate." Basically, if Blizzard doesn't like a map, they'll delete it, and there's nothing you or I or anyone else can do about it.

Map creators can only upload 5 maps total, or 20mb worth of maps, whichever comes first. These limitations encourage map makers to produce fewer maps, which can serve no other purpose but to limit the overall variety and quantity of maps available to play. The map creation utility itself, the "Galaxy Editor," is a pretty stuffy jumble, too: even the most rudimentary of maps will need a great deal of work just to make play-able. Want to be able to start a map? You need a special trigger. Want to win a game? You need a special trigger. Want to lose a game? You need a special trigger. Want to start the map with the camera over your units? That's right, you need a special trigger. This makes the map-editor very, very difficult for beginning map-makers to get into... which further decreases the variety and quantity of maps.

It's not all bad, for the map-creators. As I mentioned earlier, Blizzard wants to sell custom maps. What this means is that, should the map's creator desire to do so, a custom map can be sold for money. Most of that money will go to the individual who created the map--but some of it will also go to Blizzard. While this is great news for the map-creators, it's bad news for the consumers. Because Blizzard wants to make a bussiness out of the buying and selling of maps, that means they have one thing to worry about: piracy! To prevent the piracy of marketed maps, they have locked the game so that you can ONLY play maps that have been downloaded through Battle.net.

Want to play a custom map that includes an homage to coprighted material? Too bad, Blizzard won't host it. Want to play a custom map that has content Blizzard deems too offensive or mature? Too bad. Want to play a map some random guy at Blizzard decided he just plain didn't like? You're out of luck.

So, in the end, us single-players will be stuck with fewer maps, less variety in maps, and will have to suffer through far too many menus, screens rigamaroll to even play the maps we want to play.

Score: 35%

Graphics and Presentation:

Proving that Blizzard doesn't have a reputation for being one of the best game developers in the world for nothing, Starcraft 2 looks and plays beautifully. The graphics scale marvelously, meaning that even older machines can manage to play the game on fairly high settings without having to worry about lag. The game is also free from bugs and glitches: very refreshing these days.

Animations, modeling, textures, sound and visual effects are all top notch. Currently, Starcraft 2 looks better and plays better than any game on the market. The soundtrack is varied, and features a number of updated tracks from the first games. In terms of graphics and presentation, there is hardly anything to complain about—but that's not the same as having nothing to complain about.

I feel a bit bad criticizing the presentation of Starcraft 2 after going off on the poor quality of the narrative earlier: after all, the game looks fantastic and has no real problems. What, then? Well, it's a minor thing: the art style is a bit... off. While most female character maintain relatively human proportions, every man in the game is an over-muscled malformed brute. Think the Hulk, or some other comic book muscleman. It's a bit annoying. Another problem I have with the art design is the changes applied to Jim Raynor (or, rather, additions). His arms are covered in tattoos... an antithetical aesthetic to a lawman's image, but I suppose it meshes with Blizzard's (painfully inane) decision to retcon Raynor into a criminal.

Score: 100%

Final Comments:

How you feel about Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty is very much dependent upon how you felt about the original game and Brood War. Did you enjoy those earlier iterations because of how the game played, or did you remember them because of the characters involved in the narrative and the choices they made?

If it was all about the gameplay to you, you'll fall in love with Starcraft 2. It looks great and it plays great, and that's all you're really asking for. From the single-player perspective, however, Wings of Liberty looks quite the opposite. The returning characters have much less depth; the new characters have none. The overall narrative is a mess, devoid of things so simple and basic and a narrative arc and tension, let alone character development. Compared to the quality of the narrative in Starcraft and Brood War, Starcraft 2's single player campaign does nothing but disappoint: all of the decent or memorable lines to be found are all, without exception, taken from the earlier games. If not for the Starcraft label, there really wouldn't be anything to talk about.

So, what is Starcraft 2? From the Single Player Perspective? It's not much. By itself, it is nothing; by its connection to Starcraft and Brood War, it is woefully lacking. While the campaign's maps are a lot of fun to play, playing custom maps is far too much of a hassle. So, now that its out and all the hype is finally dying down, how does Starcraft 2 measure up to its predecessors?

Not nearly so well as it ought to.

Score: 50%  Final Score: 61%

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