StarCraft 2 Review

Final Thoughts

Flying in the face of twelve years of development in the RTS genre, there is no way StarCraft 2 should be any good. Hadn’t we moved on from unit churning mechanics, complex resource systems and base building? Games such as Company of Heroes and Dawn of War 2 have streamlined the experience, simplifying and cutting out all the fluff to leave us with a much more concentrated type of strategy game.


But StarCraft 2 is good. Very good. Utterly absorbingly good. The gameplay may be a decade old but it’s been balanced and tuned to a razor sharp point before being wrapped in an engrossing storyline and excellent campaign mode. The game is chock full of quality missions and set pieces and while there are some ideas that fall a bit flat, the highlights shine through like a high power laser through wet toilet paper.

The production values throughout are stratospherically high too, from the superb voiceovers to the simply jaw dropping rendered cut scenes, all of which leaves you with a feeling of, well, grandeur. So much care and attention has been shown in the making of the game that after sitting down and playing StarCraft 2’s single player, we were left with just one way to describe it; “epic.”


The multiplayer experience will, as with all strategy games depend very much on your patience and whether you’ve got the will to learn all three race’s tech trees, but Blizzard has done as much as possible to ease new players in. From what we’ve seen of it so far the new and improved Battle.net is great and there are already mods and user created maps like tower defence starting to appear, surely a positive sign for the future.

So yes, StarCraft 2 is unashamedly old school, but then with its devout international following, it was never going to be a huge leap onwards from the original. Instead Blizzard has refined this aged recipe to its pinnacle, improving it as much as possible given the limits of the core mechanics. The result is a hugely accomplished, beautifully polished and deeply engrossing game that we've been hard pressed to tear our selves away from long enough to write this review.