Starcraft 2 review
9 Aug
by gSathe
first published in The Hindustan Times, 7th August 2010. You can read the edited article here.
Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty released last week. All gamers can stop now, and just go buy/play the game. For everyone else: the first Starcraft game was released in March 1998, and has gone on to become the most enduring Real Time Strategy Game, the de facto national sport of South Korea and one of the most popular video games in Sri Lanka. Twelve years have passed, and the world is a very different place.
In 1998 Titanic was rising again, on a wave of Academy Awards. We were testing our nukes and Pakistan theirs. Cell phones were horribly expensive bricks which didn’t send text messages, and had monochrome screens. Windows 98 was very new, and very awesome. And the internet was still heralded by the jangling clangs of 14.4 kbps dial up connections squawking at each other.
The developer, Blizzard (now ActivisionBlizzard) was and remains one of the most respected names in game development. They have always taken a long time to develop games, releasing them only when satisfied, trusting quality over a good launch window. It has paid off for them, making them the biggest video game company in the world. In 1998, they were riding the wave created by Warcraft 1 and 2, both highly successful RTSes (a military management genre, where you collect resources, build armies, and conquer other players territories), and their fantasy adventure game Diablo. While the Warcraft games were shallow and simplistic, they helped define the emerging genre, and the fantasy setting of a battle between humans and orcs generated a powerful mythology which would eventually culminate in the billion dollar enterprise that is World of Warcraft.
When Starcraft was announced, many expected it to be Warcraft… IN SPACE! And in a sense, they were right. The basics of the genre were already well defined and needed little to change. However, in Warcraft there were only two factions to choose from, humans and orcs, and both sides had armies composed of the same basic units, just with different names and animations. The result was a very symmetrical matchup with little flexibility and limited scope for tactics. In Starcraft, Blizzard created one of the most beautifully balanced RTS games ever created.
Starcraft featured a careful mix of units in three seperate factions. There are the humans (Terrans), space colonialists fleeing an overpopulated Earth, these Terrans establish one of their colonies in a planet they do not realise is already populated by the brutal and seemingly primitive Zerg. Before they get to learn more about the Zerg the shadowy and technoligically advanced Protoss appear, incinerate the planet, and quickly leave before the Terrans can react. Soon we learn the Zerg are part of a collective organism called the overmind, and are a formidable threat in their own right, and that the Protoss were acting in self defence.
No side has any obvious advantages but each supports very different playstyles, and the fine balancing of units created a fast paced game where the players have to think on their feet. Flexibility in planning and strategic management are key to winning at Starcraft, and this continues in the newly launched sequel, with every gambit is vulnerable to counterattacks by an intelligent opponent, teaching the player to play with a dozen backup plans behind every feint. Whether you are a defensive Terran player building up bunkers to control chokepoints on the map or a Zerg building up a swarm to rush the enemy base, or a Protoss researching technology to make sure that your military has all the tactical options it needs, you need to keep an eye on the borders of your own territory for the first clues of what the other side is upto, because you might have to change your entire campaign strategy in minutes.
Blizzards reputation in the gaming world matches that of Pixar in animation, and their trademark attention to quality and quirky sense of humor which underpins stories of great tragedies continues to shine. With Starcraft, and its later expansion Brood War, Blizzard didn’t just create a great game, and one which would endure through endless multiplayer skirmishes, but also created a gripping story which many players struggled through the levels to see.
For many gamers, it used to be the ‘showcase’ game for a long time – the game you’d show people (mostly non-gamers) how pretty and amazing games could be. The game required strategic play, and rewarded you not with points but with an unfolding story of heroic sacrifice and betrayal. Twelve years ago when I first experienced Starcraft, I was horrified by the scene where Kerrigan was abandoned by her fellow humans to the Zerg horde, and the scene where Tassadar sacrifices himself to the overmind left me shattered.
But there is more to Starcraft than just the single player element. The balancing of the three armies makes for a game which embraces tactical play and lateral thinking, something humans are still better at than computers (we hope) and the game allows two humans to skirmish against each other, through a LAN network or the internet, via Battle.net which matches you against players at your own skill level around the world. In this Starcraft really shines, and strategies are codified and discarded as new moves emerge, much like in chess. But unlike chess, you don’t get a chance to sit down and think your move through. Some of the most skilled progamers (in Korea, naturally) have been measured at issuing upto 300 Actions Per Minute. These APM are commands you issue to the units in your army, moving them, ordering them on patrol, ordering production at your factories and training at your barracks or the harvesting of resources from your “civilian” units. A professional player in Korea can earn as much as any athelete, with huge televised audiences watching skirmishes between top level players and a betting scandal in 2008 which is wholly reminiscent of the betting scandal in cricket which ended careers in disgrace. Here too, several top gamers have been made to retire, for the good of the game.
In many ways, Starcraft 2 lives up to the hype. From the cinematics we have seen so far, it brings along the narrative established in the original, and continues to do so with a deft touch and the quality that Blizzard is known for. At the same time, the gameplay does not move far from its predecessor, which many would argue was inescapable considering the fan following the game has.
At the same time, a number of new units turn up in this game and the quality of the missions in the single player campaign remain is good too, if not particularly challenging. To many though that has long been the charm of the game – that you can have an engaging but not impossible game followed by a healthy dose of cinema and exposition, before you start the cycle again.
The multiplayer follows a similar template too. There are changes from the original but all is minimal, and the game will feel both fresh and familiar to people who have played the original. The real question though is, that in a world so different from that of 1998, does the game have a chance to find a new audience, beyond its existing fanbase? Arguably the game does not need to, but the genre has moved on since 1998, and the focus is now less on resource collection and base building and more on resource management and how you deploy the units at your disposal. In that sense, Starcraft uses more micromanagement than people may be used to today, but in doing so also provides a great deal of more flexibility to players who take the time to learn its mechanics.
Perhaps best described as an HD update of the original, the game justifies itself for any number of reasons – for nostalgia, for a return to a genre in an industry dominated by first person shooters, and for a pretty good game, which looks good and sounds great. And maybe for a piece of history too.
In 1998, I didn’t have a cellphone, my internet connection was unreliable, and nuclear hysteria gripped the nation. And I played Starcraft. In 2010, I’ve a phone that’s almost as powerful as my computer, an unlimited broadband internet connection and okay, jingoism is still very high. But I’m playing Starcraft 2, so I guess that’s all right.
Ratings:
Gameplay : 9/10
Revisits classic RTS gameplay with elan, but loses a point for not heeding modern innovations about terrain providing cover and other small tweaks.
Visual : 8/10
The game is a beautiful facelift to a very old series and as such deserves great plaudits, but like all Blizzard games, the visuals are intentionally a little restrained to allow it to perform smoothly on average PCs.
Writing : 7/10
While it stays faithful to the original, we have to admit – writing in games is cheesy. Still, the game is moving and has many moments which will strike a chord in the player. The game is also injected with many of the trademark quirks of its predecessors, which keeps it from losing more points.
Posted on August 9th, 2010 at 11:05am by Split-Screen
Filed Under: Game Reviews and Opinion, HT, Review, SC 2, Starcraft, blizzard, hindustan times, pc
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