Starcraft II review

While the single player game is drip-fed to you, one new unit at time, multi-player has a startling steep learning curve. Starcraft 2 does help to soften this with challenge levels to teach you the basics, there’s then the opportunity to play up to 50 matches against other novices at a reduced pace. Though helpful, such additions show just how tough it is to get to up to speed.

Each faction doesn’t have a huge number of units, but with three completely different forces it’s still a lot to learn. Even if you stick with playing the Terrans, you’ll need to understand how the Protoss and Zerg forces work to effectively counter them. It’s still early days, but the balancing of the various units looks to be excellent, with a wide range of valid strategies. However, Starcraft is as much about unit production as it is about tactical manoeuvres. You’ll need to be quick and efficient in setting up your economy and pumping out units.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning the online Battle.net service. All of Starcraft 2 is based around this service, though you can play offline once you’ve confirmed and activated your licence key. With slick matchmaking options, online campaign save games and hassle-free patching, we feel the pluses outweigh the negatives. We installed the game on both our home and work PCs and then seamlessly played through the campaign by flicking back-and-forth between them.

It’s the most expensive PC game we’ve seen for a while – and it plays like a game from a decade ago – but this is still a masterpiece of strategy gaming. If you’ve ever enjoyed an RTS game then you should buy Starcraft 2 because it doesn’t get much better than this.