Starcraft Campaign 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.

Starcraft 2 Campaign Part 2

This is part 2 of our three part review of the Starcraft 2 Campaign.

Another groundbreaking feature in the Starcraft 2 campaign is the ability for you to upgrade units and buildings and even choose different research paths to augment your forces and increase the tactical depth of the game.

The campaign is mainly controlled from RaynorÕs flagship, the Hyperion. On the ship, you can talk to other characters on the Bridge, visit the cantina to pound a few brews, purchase mercenary contracts or even play a mini Galaga-style arcade game, go to the Laboratory to choose your next path of either Protoss or Terran research, or go to the Armory and purchase powerful upgrades for your units.

This brings a level of choice to the game. On a single playthrough, you will not be able to afford all of the mercenaries and all of the upgrades. You will have to choose which units you like to use the most and upgrade only those. This makes the units you build on a mission that much more strategic. Should you go with upgraded Vikings or non-upgraded Goliaths to deal with enemy air? This makes the choice that much more significant, and that much more appealing for gamers.

There are also a few missions in the campaign that force you to choose what to do. This will have an effect on how the stories of certain characters end up. Blizzard has also hinted that the choices you make in this campaign may have effects in the upcoming ones. Since what paths you chose

Mercenaries are a different avenue a commander may take. Mercenaries are basically ÒsuperÓ versions of normal units that are available for an increased cost and in limited amounts. They could, however mean the difference between success or failure on a mission.

More on the Starcraft 2 Campaign in Part 3.

Starcraft 2 Campaign Review part 1

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.