14 DAY TRIAL // Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty might just be the biggest launch of the year, which is significant for a lot of reasons: it's the video game from Blizzard that is not World of Warcraft in quite a long time; it's part of the niche genre of real time strategy; it will be huge despite only being released on the good old, dying PC. And after a careful unboxing of the Collector's Edition (those USB dog tags seem mighty fragile at first glance) here's how the first hour with Starcraft II feels like:
15:00. OK, make that first hour since I start it. This game certainly takes it's time when it comes to installation and despite the nice narration that is included in the installer it still means a lot of time starring at slowly rising install percentages.
15:08. The soundtrack strikes me as a bit similar to Star Wars. I hope nobody dons a chain mail bikini...
15:15. With the game installed I still need to get a patch from the official Blizzard servers, which seems to be taking a while. The servers are probably hammered right now so I need to restart the patch program a few times to get all the package.
15:25. Blizzard paid an impressive amount of attention to the cinematics and the loading screens. Jim Raynor seems a bit more Space Marine like than I remembered him and the entire bar settings seems a bit like that Firefly television show.
15:35. But Starcraft II is very classic when it comes to looks. The User Interface takes up too much of the screen and the command buttons fell too big.
15:40. The first mission is nothing if not mediocre, moving along a preset path taking out enemy Marines and hearing propaganda messages from Mensk. This ain't the innovation in single player that Blizzard has been talking about...
15:55. The second missions was not much better. I would have expected Blizzard to handle this kind of step by step introduction in the tutorial and give players, most of them veterans of the first game, a more significant challenge from the early missions. Will play more and report back...