After 12 years of waiting, teaser trailers and beta’s, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty has finally arrived to remind everyone that Blizzard is still the king of real-time strategy. If you’re looking for a neutral, unbiased initial appraisal (as if that were even possible), you’re reading the wrong article.  If you never played the first Starcraft, or you’re primarily a console gamer, you probably don’t “get it.”

Trust me, Starcraft 2 is a big deal. How big? We are talking Angelina Jolie dancing naked through your backyard sprinkler kind of big. Starcraft 2 is all that with a side of Zerglings.

Check out this trailer if you are still worried you’re only getting 1/3 a campaign.

Long before I joined the SG team and subsequently became a default PS3 fanboy, I was a hardcore PC gamer, and the RTS genre was where I got my game on 90% of the time. Which means I played a hell of a lot of the original Starcraft. It’s a testament to the quality of the original that 12 years later gamers like myself are still playing it and are even more excited about playing the sequel than they were about the original.

Having managed to pick up my copies of the game early this morning (couldn’t stay up for the midnight release) it was all I could do not to simply run home and immediate lose myself in what is pretty much the highest profile PC RTS game of the last decade.  Alas, I am a full-time student (yes, even during the summer) and I had to wait until I finished getting my edu-ma-cation on before I could see what good ole Jim Raynor had in store for me. Once I got home I was hooked and only my desire to share the epic-ness that is SC2 has pulled me away from the game long enough to write this article.

There have been some great strategy titles since the original Starcraft was released. Games like the the first Supreme Commander, Company of Heroes, WarHammer and the Total War games. All of them were fantastic to be sure, but none of them reflect that Dune 2 style of RTS that Starcraft epitomized and made into an international decade long sensation.

The first thing I will say about Starcraft 2 is that the minimum system requirements are very generous. It even ran on my ancient AMD Athlon 64 3500+ 2.21Ghz CPU, 3GB of RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS system. Sure every setting is set to low or off and it does not look even half as good as it does on medium/high settings, but it IS stable and very playable. Blizzard has always been good at making their games accessible to as many PC gamers as possible, from those who have simple family PC’s right on up to the hardcore gamers who spend more on their rigs than they do on their cars. Running the higher settings on my FragBox, the game is fantastic looking. If there is a more visually impressive RTS out there I have not seen it.

There’s a hefty 12GB install plus a number of patches/updates to wade through when you start-up, which is fine; we are PC gamers, which means we don’t cry like four-year olds just because we have to wait a few extra minutes to play a game. Despite all the bitching and moaning about Blizzard giving us only 1/3 of a game, the sheer breadth of content is impressive. The Terran-focused single player campaign is huge and riddled with high quality cinematics, snappy briefings, an interactive bar and other locations which allow you to interact with other characters,  items, news and stats. You even have the ability to choose the missions you go on, which units you upgrade, which badass mercenary you want to hire and so much more. All of this has a direct effect on how the campaign plays out.

On the multiplayer side, well, you have a totally revamped Battle.net and more options than Frawlz has in a Thailand Red Light District. Full co-op support alongside a super-deep Leagues and Ladders system guarantees that Starcraft 2 will take its rightful spot in E-sports in the coming years. The matchmaking system works pretty well. After completing placement matches you are assigned a rank and league to play in, helping to ensure you’re playing against players of equal skill, rather than getting ravaged in 2 minutes, learning nothing, and subsequently becoming disillusioned with playing SC2 online. There are stats and achievements for pretty much everything and full on, separate ladders and leagues for 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 and 4v4 matches on top of the always fun Free-For-All matches and co-op, which is a Starcraft first.

Starcraft 2 feels immediately familiar to old school fans at the same time as it adds new mechanics, units, terrain elevation, polish and elements like a stronger focus on character interaction between missions and a much more robust storyline. All of the staples of the RTS genre (base building, resource gathering etc) remain intact, only improved with some of the innovations that arrived since the original game was released over a decade ago. Linked build orders and waypoint directions, patrols and unit behavior are all a major step above its predecessor. A simple and easy to use UI not only allows you to bring up information easily, it also fits well within the overall view without feeling cluttered. Being able to chat and interact with other Blizzard gamers (WoW, Diablo, Warcraft 3, Starcraft etc)  is a really nice touch and it works very well.

Of course, I am only just starting my battle against the Dominion and the Zerg menace, but with my kick ass new Starcraft 2 mouse pad and the strategy guide (all I needed to know was that it had Starcraft on the cover and was 20% off) I think I am in good shape. This game is why I have not forsaken my PC outright. As long as consoles continue to be the place good RTS games go to die (looking at you Supreme Commander 2), my PC(s) will remain the platform I turn to first for strategy the way it was meant to be.