Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty is the sequel to the hit game Starcraft back in 1998 made by Blizzard Entertainment. Starcraft II is a real-time strategy game which takes place in the 25th Century. In the game, you get to play as 3 different races, the Terran which are humans, the Zerg which are arthropodal aliens and the Protoss which are technologically advanced humanoid aliens.
In the story of Starcraft, around the year of 2229, the Earth fell under control of the United Powers League, a new government which is against anyone who had undergone genetic engineering or used non-essential cybernetic equipment. Government forces also cracked down on criminals, religious people, political activists and other “dissidents”. About 40 years after, thousands of such people were placed in “super-carriers” as a colonisation project. The project went out of plan and would soon form 3 colonies on 3 different planets. The three planets were called, Tarsonis, Moria and Umoja. Tarsonis was the most powerful colony and formed the Terran Confederacy. The Confederacy was a corrupt government and would mistreat its colonists. This led to many rebellions to take them down. This is the quick explanation of the lore of the game.
In Starcraft II, the Confederacy was taken down by Arcturus Mengsk and formed a far more powerful and corrupt government called the Dominion. You play as Jim Raynor, who was part of the Sons of Korhal which was led by Arcturus Mengsk before the Confederacy was taken down and later betrayed by Mengsk. After 4 years of the Dominion taking over, you start with Jim Raynor in a bar on the planet of Mar Sara and listening to a news on television where Mengsk was branding Jim as a terrorist. Jim started his rebellion against the dominion which is your first campaign mission.
Like any other real-time strategy games, you play the game from a top-down view and have the basic functions like clicking and dragging from one point to another to form a box to select your units. The HUD is well organised and is easy to access the menus of what the units can do.
In the game, the most important unit are your workers, for the terrans, they’re called SCVs. They are used to collect resources like minerals and vespene gas, this is important as a stable economy is required to train stronger units. To train SCVs, you get them from the command centre, which is your starting building and it should be of up most priority to keep it alive. Your SCVs can also construct buildings like supply depots, which increases your max unit space up to 200, as the more advanced the unit is, the more space it requires.
Hotkeys are also necessary as this game is micro-management heavy, it can be bound from 1-0 keys to easily access different types of units. It also allows you to construct buildings much faster instead of using your mouse which wastes time.
Each unit also has its strengths and weaknesses, for example, the marine which is the first offensive unit you can train as terran is a biological unit and is easily killed by other units that deal extra damage to biological units. So it is important to know what units your enemy is training to counter it.
The campaign story is fairly decent although some parts are rather cliché and cheesy and some missions could get repetitive like one mission where you have to mine a certain amount of minerals to accomplish it. However, most of the missions are still entertaining and could get you addicted to them.
Starcraft II on the competitive side is where most new players should stay away from at first. One should learn the basics and get the hang of using hotkeys and having quick reaction times. This is because, the really good players could easily outnumber you very easily and you don’t have enough time to react to it. Starcraft II has a ranking system so most likely, you would play against players of your skill level. Bronze is the lowest rank while Grand Masters is the highest.
The graphics are very detailed and pleasant to look at. The game is quite optimised so players would not require very needy specifications to play it. Most people who play the game competitively put the graphics at low as the environment could sometimes be distracting for them.
In my opinion, this game is a great choice for people who are interested in real-time strategy games and competitive play. The campaign is about 18 hours long so it would take a fairly long amount of time to complete which is great for the people who want to enjoy it. The game is priced at around S$49 at retail price which is a decent price for an AAA game.
Photo courtesy of:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-strategy/377148-protoss-hotkeys-101
http://www.starcraft-replay.com/guides/starcraft-2-terran-strategy-best-counters-vs-terran-units.php
http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/2494686/season-1-milestones-3-21-2011
http://www.notebookcheck.net/StarCraft-II-Heart-of-the-Swarm-Benchmarked.89920.0.html
http://learningsc2.com/tag/hotkeys/
http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/StarCraft_II
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