StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty

The Terran, Zerg and Protoss are back in battle again.  After 12 years of waiting Blizzard has released StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty.

StarCraft 2 has the classic real-time strategy style of play that any old-school RTS gamers will be very familiar with and the interface is clean enough that any new-school RTS gamers will find it easy to pick-up.

Especially when it comes to the campaign.  The single-player campaign consists mostly of the Terran storyline based around Jim Raynor, a former soldier in the Terran Dominion, who is rebelling again Arcturus Mengsk, the misguided morally corrupt leader of the Terran Dominion.  You’ll find an assortment of support characters and helper in the 29 missions it’ll take to finish the game.  All with their unique functions and witty brand of cheesy lines.  Surprisingly there are some Protoss missions that break up the heavy Terran storyline.

Blizzard made the decision to split the storyline into three parts.  The Zerg and Protoss single-player campaigns will be released as expansions at a later date.  There are rumors about the coming expansions but everything is speculation until Blizzard provides an official news release .  The news release will most likely include pictures and videos.

There are some muti-player games to choose from as well.  First, there is the Co-op vs AI games where you can choose between two players vs two AI players (2vAI) or three players vs three AI  players (3vAI).  Second, there is player vs player games. You can choose between 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 or 4v4.  There is a ranking and ladder system behind the player vs player games.  The better you and possibly your partner do the better your division and ranking will be.  Check out http://www.sc2ranks.com/ for the current StarCraft 2 rankings. http://starcraft.wikia.com/ has more information about the divisions and the ranking system.

Challenges are a new addition to the game. Each of the three races have their set of challenges with a grand total of nine to complete.  There are three different ratings you can get for challenges too.  They’re Gold, Silver and Bronze.  The better you do at the challenge the better your rating.

Achievements are also a new to Star Craft 2.  You’ll receive a fair number of achievements by finishing the game on normal mode, completing all the challenges with at least a bronze rating and but getting ranked in PVP.  You’ll also get portrait reward and achievement points for all achievements you complete.

Finally one of the most important features is the friends lists.  You can add friends via their email address, Facebook and their character name and character code.  Then you can chat with them in game.  What is really interesting is if your friends have a World of WarCraft account you can chat with them while you’re playing StarCraft.  It’s quite amazing actually.

Blizzard has made StarCraft 2 a really enjoyable game by adding in these new social features.  Innovations like these are starting to change how gaming companies are creating and release games as well as the communities that emerge around them.