StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Game Guide For PC

StarCraft II’s greatest achievement is the result of a tactic that almost any strategy veteran will recognise: divide and conquer. By refusing to sacrifice the singleplayer campaign as basic orientation for the multiplayer battleground, Blizzard has created a title in which overpowered units and cheerful direct-to-video spectacle sit comfortably alongside the quiet science of build queues and rush defences, and where chilly strategic depths coexist with the kind of warm immediacy that allows nervous newcomers to get straight into the carnage. It isn’t astonishing to discover that Wings Of Liberty is huge, detailed and endlessly refined, then, but it’s nothing short of miraculous to realise that the developer has devised an elegant means of countering the franchise’s most ambiguous asset – its own fearsome reputation.

Freeing the singleplayer mode from its tutorial role has allowed Blizzard to craft a game that hinges on variety and chewy excess rather than conditioning (generally via endless defeats) and rote memorisation. Tech trees throb with dangerous perks and spaceship hangars are filled with unlikely units that would be impossible to balance for multiplayer matches, but which allow for delightfully asymmetric combat within the confines of a solo experience. Meanwhile, although the narrative that unfolds across almost 30 missions is the same old chirpy genocide offered by a hundred lesser titles, it's a matter of strictly limited importance when it affords the design team the opportunity to spin up a campaign in which each objective is a tart sliver of action to be enjoyed in less than an hour.

A series of explosive spatial puzzles at heart, almost every level in StarCraft II’s gently branching narrative offers you an entirely fresh concept to get to grips with, whether it’s a new piece of hardware to trundle on to the battlefield, or an intriguing twist on an old idea that might see you facing off against zombified civilians bound to the demands of a map’s day and night cycle, turning hover-train robber, or racing to keep your SCVs two steps ahead of a shifting mass of lava.

Hinging on tactical creativity as much as click-speed, such diversions won’t alienate established players, and the pacing is almost always as good as the imagination on display, welcoming novices with a series of missions that allow the unambitious to nanny a single feisty clump of units through a map, before threading in secondary objectives and economic intricacies that naturally add to the level's flow. Elsewhere, new RPG elements give a pleasant shape to your downtime, with twin tech trees to pick through and persistent upgrades to consider, meaning that you’ll almost always have things to take your mind off the space-cowboy Top 40 blaring back at you from the 26th century, and the fact that Jim Raynor’s floating ark appears to have been decorated by an unholy alliance of the Red Dwarf crew and Liberace.

If there’s a price to pay for such a breezy and inventive approach to singleplayer, it’s that it can make the bitter realities of online matches seem even more brutal. Even here, however, Blizzard has done its best to build a game that caters for the newcomer almost as smartly as it does the veteran. Challenge missions, a series of nine mini-games which take you through the intricacies of everything from unit counters to hotkeys, are sufficiently enjoyable that even experienced players should relish tackling them, and while the muddle of AI skirmishes and practice leagues that surround the central ladder-based tournaments may leave you with the distinct sense that Blizzard is trying to delay the uncomfortable discovery that StarCraft multiplayer remains as fast and viciously Darwinian as it ever was, they’ll at least give you a fighting chance to orient yourself before suffering your first Zerg rush.

Beyond that, the simple truth is that the shift in speed between the single- and the multiplayer landscape is so pronounced, that new players will be learning as much from the post-match build queue breakdowns as they will from the cruelly efficient routings themselves. At least such feedback systems are present. Veterans, meanwhile, will find the multiplayer to be a conservative update for the most part: units have been overhauled and expanded, but the underlying design approach retains the same sense of brilliant detachment as before. There’s a fierce invention at work in the balancing of the Terran, Zerg and Protoss forces, and the endlessly fascinating ways in which such varied factions come together and pull apart makes up for a handful of maps that tend to manufacture artificial conflict a little too often with their favouring of bottlenecks and pinch points.

It’s always worth remembering, whenever Blizzard is involved, that this is only the beginning, and that behind the shiny neon façade of Battle.net, tweaks are already being made and balances are already shifting. That, coupled with the sheer scope of StarCraft II, makes its true successes impossible to assess from the current vantage point. For the time being, the best measure of the game may well be found in your willingness to restart - in the novice player’s eagerness to reload a completed mission just to see if a different strategy would work more elegantly, or in the time it takes a veteran, halfway up the ladder, to head back into the fray after a nasty pummelling, eager to exploit the tiniest of advantages in a game they already know to be unflinchingly impartial.

Given its lineage, it should hardly be surprising to discover that Blizzard has once again demonstrated such a keen sense of balance: with Wings Of Liberty, it offers established players a welcome return to familiar battlegrounds, while providing intrigued bystanders with their best chance yet of engaging with a bewildering, brilliant and punishing genre. [9]

Source: www.next-gen.biz