StarCraft 2

After all these years, the world is lucky enough to see a second installment of StarCraft. Blizzard, World Of WarCraft players devote their lives to you, and StarCraft players now worship you. Grab your mouse and keyboard, and be ready to have your interstellar mind blown, because we are about to team up with pure magnificence.

The experience begins with a breath taking cinematic video that sets the bar high and makes the gamer squeal. The vivid color contrasting with the dull machinery captures the mind and sucks you into the world. Did I mention the detail? This game pays more attention to detail than an anal retentive cubical worker with OCD. The focus on smaller details puts just about all others to shame. Once you play StarCraft 2, you realize why it took so long to release it. Other than beautifully detailed units and buildings, the environments are astounding. The creative places and settings mix up the gameplay and create a more believable experience. The best part of the main storyline is honestly the cinematic moments. If you have played Uncharted 1 or 2, do remember the first time you saw the ridiculously beautiful scenery? Well, that was my reaction to the cinemas, maybe even with 1% more excitement (but probably not since I'm a Sony Fanboy, but that says alot).

The campaign offers a unique style of gameplay. You're following the path of Jim Raynor and his struggle against Arcturus Mengsk, as well as his longing for Sarah Kerrigan. Before launching a specific mission, you can travel around the places Raynor uses as a Headquarters. I will withhold the names of these locations due to spoilers; however, the Headquarters offer places like an Armory, Lab, Cantina, and other locations to explore. There are many easter eggs to be found that call back to other games like WoW, Diablo, and even StarCraft spinoffs that never made it. You can talk to side characters that mean nothing, play a minigame, watch news, and relax. The interactions with others can effect what will play out in the story mode. There are four tiers of missions to complete during the main campaign. Three are Terran based, and one is Protoss based, but there will be an expansion the follows the Zerg as well. One cool feature that is in a few missions requires you to make a choice of who to support; think of it as kind of a "Good" or "Bad" karma choice you have to make. The campaign is long and can be challenging, but prepare for tons of epic battles and excitement. With plenty of achievements and side objectives to unlock and beat, you will have plenty to do.



If you happen to do everything for the campaign and destroy all the missions and beat all the achievements, do not worry... the multiplayer can give you an unlimited amount of stuff to unlock. There are several game modes to keep you busy, and there is a separate section to improve your skills and challenge your ingenuity, and again it gives more achievements! With thousands of enemies and many leagues to compete in, you should be about set with online gaming opponents until March of 2037. You can battle 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4, Free-for-All, against A.I., or sit and look at the cool menu.

The gameplay is like the first StarCraft on steroids. It is still in all its RTS glory. For those who just thought "What is RTS?" It stands for real time strategy. Think of it as chess without taking turns. In StarCraft 2, you have a birds eye view of the battlefield, and you are in charge of a small base of workers. Your job is to collect resources, build buildings that produce soldiers and equipment upgrades, spy on your enemies, and expand to other resource deposits all at the same time. This is a multi-taskers dream. If you're really unsure, youtube has plenty of videos that exhibit good gameplay to show you what to expect.

Another great thing about StarCraft 2 is how available the game is even to people (like me) who do not have powerful computers dedicated for gaming. I run on an old HP a706n, and after I added 2 GBs of RAM and a video card, even I was able to play. If you are like me, you might have to exclude 3v3 or 4v4 game modes because of lag... but everything else works! However, such low requirements does an injustice to the beauty of the game. StarCraft 2 deserves to be played on High Quality. A quality I hope to be on in two months.

The minimum requirements are as follows:
PC: Windows XP/Vista/7 with DirectX 9.0c, 2.6 GHz Pentium IV or AMD Anthlon processor. 128 MB PCIe NVIDIA Geforce 6600 GT or ATI Radeon 9800PRO Video card or better.
Mac: Mac OS X 10.5.8.10.6.2 or newer, Intel Processor, NVIDIA Geforce 8600m, ATI X1600 or better.
Both Require: 12GB HD space, 1 GB of ram, Internet(LOL), DvD Rom Drive, 1024x720 display resolution

Of course, you can get away with not meeting them all, because in reality they are just recommended minimum requirements. If you are not sure if you meet these requirements and want help or anything, etc... you can send an e-mail to either the entire team or myself. Just click the Contact Us tab on the main page and send away.

For PC gamers who enjoy a good RTS, this is a must buy. So buy it!


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