Meet Jim Raynor, the focal point of the Terran campaign.

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is one of those rare titles that needs no introduction. The original StarCraft turned the Real Time Strategy game community upside down with its three balanced races that shared very little in common. It also had a stellar single player campaign, and a multiplayer service that changed the way that players look at lobbies and interacting with other players forever in the original Battle.net service. How could the sequel possibly live up to the hype surrounding a game that still maintains a five digit player base at any given time after almost 15 years?

Good news, it did.

Wings of Liberty will take you from a backwater station on Mar Sara, and into the stars aboard Jim Raynor’s battleship. You’ll meet a new crew and cast, with all of the power players from the first game returning at some point to talk business with Raynor, or settle the score. Kerrigan, the infamous Queen of Blades, will also come into play and must be dealt with however, which becomes the main focal point of the overarching storyline.

The single player campaign consists of 29 varied missions, with a few plot splits and options along the way. When you’re ready to take the fight to another player, the Multiplayer setup somehow manages to one-up the original Battle.net service. The new Battle.net 2.0 enriches your online experience with tiered ladders for different skill levels, a custom map editor capable of creating anything you can put your mind to, and more achievements and goals to work for than you can shake a stick at. Blizzard Entertainment has created an extremely well rounded package that offers a little bit of something for everyone... provided you're a fan of RTS gameplay in the first place.

Cautions

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty has been rated T for Teen by the ESRB. It contains:

  • Blood and Gore
  • Language
  • Suggestive Themes
  • Use of Alcohol and Tobacco
  • Violence


Space Marines and aliens die in many, many ways, and while they may also partake of some substances, none of it is emphasized or intended to be influential at all.

Gameplay - 90 / 100

Before we dive into the gameplay of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, please note that the Mulitplayer aspects of the game will be reviewed and scored in a separate section. As such, the Gameplay Score reflects the single player components only.

Beyond the Liberty campaign, players also have access to optional tutorials, challenges and even custom matches against AI opponents.

The Liberty campaign starts off with simple missions and includes plenty of optional tutorials should you need them. Raynor's Raiders start taking missions for profit and needless to say, get in way over their head. Raynor is right at home with that feeling thankfully. Cruising the stars in the Hyperion, you'll take the fight to every fringe world in the star system, and even back to locations familiar to players of the original game such as Korhal and Char.

The Hyperion is split into four sections, and each one has objects and people to interact with. The dialogue is typically relevant to your previous mission, and helps define the crew of your ship. As for what you actually can do that affects the game, you can upgrade your units, access previous missions, do research with artifacts that you've collected throughout your missions and more. The best thing to compare it to is managing your crew on the Normandy in Mass Effect after a mission, and if you know what I'm talking about, you know it's a good thing. You can even relax a bit with a classic arcade shooter in the bar, The Lost Viking. Hope you've got good reflexes though, or you won't last long!

The missions are widely varied. One will have you holding off infested terrans by night and purging the city by day. Another might have you harvesting minerals in a world that overflows with lava constantly, forcing you to retreat to the high ground and lift off structures. One even has you hijacking trains. Part of the variety comes from the single player units introduced with specific missions that have been crafted to showcase that particluar unit's abilities. However, there are a lot of units in the campaign that you'll never see in the multiplayer aspect of the game. Old friends like Wraiths and Vultures, and crazy units like the Diamondback that can fire while on the move are just the tip of the iceberg.

StarCraft II offers plenty of interesting diversions between each mission.

While there is obviously a need for separation between the structure of the campaign missions and multiplayer modes, newcomers to the StarCraft universe may have a more difficult transition between the two due in part to the different units or abilities available in the Liberty campaign. It also notably only grants missions where you'll assume control of Terran units for the most part, with a smattering of Protoss missions thrown into the mix. So while the single player game may be extremely well crafted for both newcomers to the RTS party as well as StarCraft veterans, due to splitting the campaings into a trilogy it also has the potential to leave players hitting multiplayer for the first time ill prepared in terms of understanding build orders and tech trees for each of the three armies.

This is offset somewhat with the addition of Challenges. Ranging from beginner to expert in terms of difficulty, the single player challenges add something extra to the mix outside of the more story driven mission chain and give players the opportunity to learn more about the strengths and weaknesses of all three armies. When combined with the ability to create and play matches against A.I. opponents, both help fill in the relative learning curve gaps of the campaign.

The single player campaign can also notably be tackled on one of four difficulty settings which can be changed on the fly. This ranges from easy enough that your mother could handle it, to Brutal which is a level that challenges even the most hardcore of RTS players for once.

Graphics - 97 / 100

The biggest thing the graphics engine has going for it is the scalability. On Ultra settings, Zerg Eggs pulse faster and faster as they’re about to hatch, shadows look perfect, and the explosions and death that make up a large battle are hard to take your eyes off long enough to issue orders to your army. The cutscenes, both in-game and the cinematic sequences, are in typical Blizzard style, setting the genre standard for years to come.

On Low settings, this game will run on virtually any machine with a decent amount of RAM, and while looking completely different, is also completely playable. I wouldn’t want to run this game on Low, but for those of you rocking on-board graphics cards, it just might be an option if you want to play.

Units explode in the most gruesome ways depending on how they die, but this still doesn’t push the envelope of graphics on Ultra at all in-game. It’s still a beautiful sight, but not a groundbreaker. The only time you’ll see things go to hell on your machine due to an overload on screen is when a Mothership is stealthing and unstealthing entire armies on screen at once.

Sound - 90 / 100

The music is a little more subtle this time, with a few themes for each race and some for specific missions. They’re a little less catchy, but still capture the feel of the races and are well suited for them. Sound effects are spot on, from blades slashing through steel and flesh to Terran buildings firing up rocket boosters to cruise through the skies. Voices of units are crisp and clear in-game, and voices of the heroes in cutscenes perfectly cast. The only one I question is the change in Kerrigan, but hearing the voices of Raynor and Mengsk return is wonderful news to my ears.

Of course, you have to give props to them for handing you a jukebox to crank tunes on in between missions. Sweet Home Alabama never gets old, though you may occasionally find yourself wishing for a little more variety here.

Multiplayer - 97 / 100

The bulk of the multiplayer action in StarCraft II for now lies in the competitive ladder. You’ll have the option to do 5 practice matches on simpler maps to get accustomed to the game, then do 5 placement matches. These five placement matches will put you against a wide range of opponents to determine your skill level and where you might fall in the brackets. Once you’ve been placed, you will then be matched against opponents near your skill level generally, with some battles being one league up, or one league down from time to time. You can also be promoted or demoted with time on the battlefield, depending on your performance.

As for the actual gameplay itself, it’s immaculate. The new units add a very powerful early game option to each race, as well as diversify the late game strategies. Each unit has a purpose, with only a few units feeling somewhat left out, and only somewhat. Rushing, teching, fast expanding, proxy attacks… everything is possible and you have to be ready for anything. No two games will play out the same, and that’s the key to making an enjoyable and lasting ladder experience.

Should the speedy RTS cutthroat style of multiplayer not be your thing, the custom map editor returns with even more power than it had in the first StarCraft and WarCraft III combined. Anything is possible now, and if you’ve played either of the aforementioned games you probably have an idea of how crazy the maps can get. There truly is something for just about everybody in the custom games.

The custom map selection is a little lacking at the moment, but it will grow with time just like its predecessors did. The interface to select your game of choice is poor, though. Maps are sorted by popularity by default, which is well and good, but searching for a particular map or map type is difficult and generally leads to you mashing the Show More button until you find the map you like. While the WarCraft III interface for searching for custom games certainly left something to be desired as well, I feel that the new Battle.net 2.0 interface is a step in the wrong direction.

Value - 95 / 100

There’s always some new achievement to work towards, or some alternative campaign strategy to attempt. You can always work to be better in multiplayer in some way, and there are new custom maps coming out by the hour. A limitless stream of content is going to come from StarCraft II, and the only question is if the content is worth the $59.99 price tag to you right now.

The Single Player is 29 missions, with them taking anywhere from 5 to 45 minutes each. Most people will clear it in about 15 hours, completionists will find themselves doing a second run and having it take upwards of 30-40 hours. This will naturally vary from player to player, but with the inclusion of additional challenges and custom A.I. matches and the fact that just about all aspects of gameplay are linked to achievements, StarCraft II offers a little bit of something for players of all types.

Seeing as multiplayer isn’t for everyone, we’ve weighed this score based primarily on the single player experience in case you can’t, or have no desire to play online.

Lasting Appeal - 87 / 100

The campaign is sweet and the multiplayer is finely tuned, but even after two weeks I find myself more and more distracted as I play the game. Perhaps it’s the fact that the campaign is complete, and the custom game selection is full of rather imbalanced and poorly designed maps at the moment. I know I’ll find myself coming back to play the latest iteration of the hugely popular Defense of the Ancients, but is that me coming back to play StarCraft II, or someone else’s work? A dramatic, story-driven game is only worth so much on a second playthrough after all.

Pros and Cons

PROS:

  • It’s finally here: the continuation of Jim Raynor’s story! And it’s a good one, the campaign is great.

  • Multiplayer is a highly refined sequel to the original, with league placement being a great idea to keeping all skill levels of players interested.

  • This map editor can do anything. An Ultralisk attacked my bunker, picked it up between its blades, and carried it back to the Zerg base. Holy crap.


CONS:

  • Once you’ve seen it all in the campaign, jumping from mission to mission knowing what happens really takes the fun out of the single player experience, especially given the liberal use of cutscenes to tell the bulk of the story.

  • Multiplayer hasn’t changed that much from the first game. If you didn’t like it then, chances are you won’t like it now. They didn’t try and reinvent the wheel, which is both a good and a bad thing.

  • Battle.net 2.0 is a blessing and a curse. Forcing people to be online to play the game and earn achievements is a little cruel, and the custom game search screen is just poorly implemented.


Conclusion

StarCraft II has been a long time coming. We’ve been clamoring for it for over a decade, and it has delivered on almost all fronts. Fans of the first game will not be disappointed whatsoever, and the campaign delivers an epic experience in both storyline and gameplay. The multiplayer is well balanced and has many diverse strategies and options available to each player. As time passes, we’ll see more and more amazing things come from the map editing community as well. The bar has been set for the RTS developer community, and Blizzard Entertainment has once again managed to set it awfully high!

Overall 92/100 - Outstanding

Metacritic

To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Game Page.

Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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