StarCraft 2 Beta First Impressions

StarCraft 2

Still, that’s no reason to end on a downer because there’s still a significant part of me that’s desperate to tell you how good StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty is – and it really is very good indeed. If you’re confident that this type of strategy game, with such a heavy focus on competitive gameplay and in-depth planning, is something you’d like then I can assure you that it’s shaping up to be a corker.

Then again, considering how much work Blizzard is putting into the game that’s something which should go without saying. Even the revamped Battle.net system which underpins the whole experience is brilliantly realised (even if it does take uncomfortably long to find matches sometimes, which is likely due to low player numbers right now).

As we said before a lot of the interface is unchanged from the first game, but even the few tweaks and adjustments which have been implemented have obviously been well thought out and justified. Blizzard clearly knows what it is doing when it comes to the positioning of even the lowliest sprites.


Still, there are definitely a few things which grate across both the personal and professional viewpoint – and the main annoyance is exactly that; the viewpoint. Put plainly, the camera in StarCraft 2 feels like a downright nuisance and is so zoomed in that you’ll find yourself constantly dodging away from your screen in order to avoid getting caught in the explosions.

That’s not an overstatement either – the images in this article all show the game zoomed out to the maximum and, while you can push the camera in and to ground-level, you have to wonder what the worth of that ability is. It’s not like the game is playable from that perspective. The fact that you can’t rotate the camera means that it’s not even all that useful for taking screenshots, to be honest. Frankly, for a PC exclusive game, we’d hope for some proper camera control. (Update: It turns out you can rotate the camera afterall. Whoops!)


StarCraft 2 won’t be the first game to prove that gamers will cope with the most atrocious excesses of perspective as long as the game itself is interesting though. That honour probably goes to Resident Evil on the PlayStation. It’s something we’re sure we’ll adjust too and really isn’t something worth worrying about too much.

There’s no denying that StarCraft 2 is going to be an absolute monster of a game in terms of both quality and success. It’ll blow the top off the sales chart and net Blizzard another couple of billion, easy. At the same time though, it’s clear even to the uninitiated that the game (or the beta, at least) isn’t doing anything wholly new or revolutionary.

Instead, StarCraft 2’s multiplayer seems to be more about refining and glamming up the systems of the original game, rather than pushing things to a new level. There’s plenty to be disappointed about in that, but it’s important to remember that all we’ve got to survey at the moment is the multiplayer beta – and that that alone presents plenty for established StarCraft fans to get excited about.

StarCraft 2 is in beta at the moment, but it’s still set for a release in mid 2010 on PC, where it will be published by Activision.