Starcraft Campaign Review part 3

Welcome to our third and final installment of our three part review of the groundbreaking Starcraft 2 Campaign.

If you are new to Starcraft, or new to Real Time Strategy games in general, then you really need to start out on either Casual or Normal difficulty. As a die-hard Starcraft veteran who also played Warcraft 3, Company of Heroes and Dawn of War, Hard difficulty was, well, Hard.

Following on the footsteps of Blizzard’s (and the entire  worlds’) highest grossing game of all time, World of Warcraft,  there are achievements in Starcraft 2 for everything. And now, there are no single player “cheats” you can use to get the achievement since you have to log into Battle.net for the achievements to count.

Because of the achievements the Starcraft 2 campaign will have a lot of replay value for a lot of people. On top of the missions being extremely unique, there are achievements for doing “bonus” objectives on certain difficulties. These achievements also reward the player with portraits they can use on their online Battle.net profiles and are a great way to show off your gaming prowess to your friends.

The story is epic, but the end is such a cliffhanger that you may not feel satisfied by it. That’s probably what Blizzard wants because they want you to purchase the two upcoming expansions featuring the Zerg and Protoss campaigns. I’m not going to tell you the ending, so if that’s what you’re looking for, go play the game!

Because it does a great job combining RPG and RTS elements, has very deep tactical and character choices for the player to make, excels at making each mission unique and memorable, and has a ton of achievements to keep players coming back, the Starcraft 2 campaign is a great leap forward for the single player experience with Real Time Strategy, or any other kind of game.