This is the first of a 3 part review of the Starcraft 2 Campaign. There’s a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get started right now.
The Starcraft 2 campaign is the greatest campaign ever for a Real Time Strategy game. Game maker Blizzard Entertainment delivers a top-notch RTS experience combined with compelling characters and a storyline that makes you feel almost as if you’re playing an role playing game.
The story follows rebel leader Jim Raynor, who was a hero who helped save the universe in the original Starcraft, but has been painted as a terrorist by the diabolical Arcturus Mengsk, the dictator of the “Terran Dominion”, which began as a rebel movement against the galaxy’s former corrupt government, the Confedaracy. The Dominion under Mengsk’s rule turned out to be just as, if not even more, corrupt than the Confederacy, which is why Raynor quit following Mengsk and why Mengsk uses the controlled media to mar Raynor’s reputation.
In the beginning of the campaign, you find Raynor at a small bar on a fringe world and fallen on hard times. He is confronted by his old partner in crime Tychus Findley, and it’s not really clear whether Raynor can trust him or not.
The campaign is designed beautifully with compelling cut scenes featuring the best digital animation created to date. The story unfolds through a twisting mire of unique missions that challenge the player to do something new in each one, often adding a new unit to command in the process.
For example, in one mission your objective may be to harvest a special type of gas from a planet while evil and overzealous Protoss are trying to seal the geysers forever. Another mission tasks the player with stopping Dominion trains before they reach their destination, and in yet another the player takes control of a single unit that fights alongside friendly computer-controlled forces to assault a massive enemy base.
These are not your run of the mill RTS missions. Perhaps the single best thing the Starcraft 2 campaign accomplishes is making every mission unique.
(part 2 …)