The Wait Is Over

Blizzard finally released the first part of Starcraft 2 at the end of July, some 12 years after the Brood War expansion for the original game. It's not doing too badly for itself; I read that it is already the best-selling PC title of this year, that it is the fastest selling strategy game ever, and it has a pretty impressive metascore so far. I've had a chance to give it a try this last week.

I'm impressed with the layout of the single player campaign; when I read that Blizzard wanted to separate it from the multiplayer, to make it more objective based, I thought they were going to go the same route as Relic did in the campaign of Dawn of War 2 and make a series of those "dungeon crawl" missions. However, most of the levels still allow base building, but they manage to throw in an unique variable into each of the levels to change it up from the norm. In addition, they've used the disconnect from multiplayer to include a whole range of units they couldn't balance effectively for competitive game. It's a really good way of handling the campaign.


I'm not sure I'm too big a fan of the storytelling, though. Jim Raynor shifts unconvincingly between goofy and driven, the news reports it plays between missions are heavy-handed and the whole atmosphere seems a little... lightweight. It's not Mass Effect, certainly, but maybe it was never meant to be. I'm about 12 missions into the campaign, so it is probably unfair for me to pass judgement on the whole storyline yet, but I do feel it is a bit slow, that it lacks the urgency it needs. There is a simple reason for this; the game is too drawn out. Blizzard decided early on to split Starcraft 2 into 3 games, so they've had to bloat the campaign to make it full-length. There are too many side missions, and the game doesn't drive the importance of these to the main threat of the Zerg invasion. I think the campaign of Chaos Rising was only 10 or 12 missions in total, but that far into Starcraft 2 I feel like things are still building up. I'm not sure I agree with Blizzard that they had too much story to tell for just one game, I think they've just got used to doing things slowly so they can continue to sell to people.


In the campaign, the desire to get more units and move the story forward, combined with the unique aspects of most of the missions, keeps you going, but the basic gameplay itself feels like a throwback. I still believe the original Starcraft to have been the best RTS ever, in terms of how good it was for its time. It had a great setting and a strong story, but these elements are subjective, it was also revolutionary to the genre. It was probably the first RTS with completely differentiated races, going far beyond what Command & Conquer had done. By comparison, Starcraft 2 seems very conservative. It still only has 3 races, and it doesn't really have anything fundamentally different from what the original had, over 12 years ago. The genre has moved forward, but Blizzard have elected not to. They can probably argue that they didn't want to fix what wasn't broken, but I agree with a recent Penny Arcade post which stated that there is "a safety in thought and deed here that borders on cowardice." The game is brand new, after an extremely long development period, yet it already feels old in certain respects.


I haven't tried much of the multiplayer yet. My first attempt at a co-op game was crippled by lag despite having only two local players, which must have been a server-side anomaly. I've had 3 1v1 multiplayer games, in the training league which slows the game down and protects your base with barriers that need to be destroyed. The first two games I was building away steadily when a couple of Battlecruisers floated in and crippled my defenses (which was particularly annoying as I used to hate the turtle and battlecruiser swarm tactic in the first Starcraft). The third game I decided to try that same strategy for myself and just mine furiously until I could deploy battlecruisers; I would have been zealot-rushed if it wasn't for the novice map's protection of the base entrance, but eventually I did manage to build 4 or 5 battlecruisers. My opponent, however, had built almost a full screen's worth of Protoss stalkers, and they eventually overwhelmed my base. While I'm clearly still very bad at the game, in all 3 cases I felt like I was out-built rather than out-fought.


There's an impressive amount of polish in the game, as one would expect when a game takes many years and reportedly $100 million to make, but I would have liked to have seen a little more from it. Perhaps Blizzard were worried that to make too many changes would endanger the inherent "Starcraftiness" of the game. Whatever the reason, they've picked their market deliberately, and so far it seems that market is entirely satisfied. Sadly, however, I'm not sure I'm part of that market.

The Wrath of War

After being diverted from it to play the campaign in Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising, I've recently gone back to playing Darksiders, as game I mentioned in my stylish hard action game round up a few months back.


I was reminded of a Penny Arcade comic about the game (I would also recommend reading the newspost attached to it), and specifically its relationship with Dante's Inferno, a game I also included in the SHA round up and was not bowled over by the demo of. Certainly, Darksiders includes elements easily recognisable from other games, but Dante's Inferno feels like a God of War clone, like it set out with only one goal in mind. Darksiders pulls from many sources and suffuses them with its own style, it certainly doesn't come across as a copy of any one thing. Visually and thematically, it actually reminds me more of Soul Reaver than any recent game, which is certainly no bad thing.

Mechanically, it's far from perfect. The graphics are not amazing; I think, resolution aside, they would have been matched by games on the previous generation of consoles (I'm thinking Ninja Gaiden on the original Xbox and God of War on the PS2). The animation can be quite stiff and the combat is less fluid than Dante's Inferno or Bayonetta, with the combo system not seeming to have as much depth. It has a lot of charm, though. In this modern era of ruthlessly focus tested games and safe-bet sequels, Darksiders comes across as a the product of a developer who had an idea for an awesome game and just went ahead and tried to make it, which makes any shortcomings far easier to forgive.

I'm not very far in it, and it seems like quite an expansive game (sadly, for me, this is not necessarily a good thing), but so far I'm really enjoying it. I'm pleased to see that it was fairly well received critically, and I read that it sold quite well, too. I appreciate what Vigil have tried to do with the game, and I'm glad to see it has brought them success.

In Service Of The Creed

I finished Assassin's Creed 2 last week, and while it's certainly a very good game, I don't think I enjoyed it as much as I did the first game. I don't think this was because the first game was necessarily better, but rather due to the nature of the game itself.

I really enjoyed Assassin's Creed 1, I will happily admit that it was flawed, but I appreciated that it tried to break the mould, to do something ambitious and different. The things which stayed with me were the stunning visuals and the air of mystery to the game, the view of a new city as you rounded the a corner and first saw the city walls, the panoramic vistas from atop the viewpoints in the cities, the use of colour, the realistic way Altair moved amongst the crowds, clambered up almost any surface, and the brutality and weight of the strikes in combat.

Altair looks over Jerusalem in Assassin's Creed

It was more of an experience than a game, in fact in terms of gameplay it actually came up short in many respects. The free running essentially just involved steering your character as the jumping and climbing were automatically handled, and the combat, while viscerally satisfying in a way that videogame combat rarely is, was incredibly simple and unchallenging. There was also the inescapable fact that the game was essentially just about walking around in between the assassination missions, which probably made up around an hour of the game's length.

For the sequel, Ubisoft seem to have layered on more game-like elements onto the same template, and I don't think it worked as well as most reviewers have indicated, as these were never the strengths of the game. You received several new abilities, many of which you had no need to use (did anyone actually use poison during the game?), you could upgrade your armour (but with combat being so easy, you never needed the extra health it provided) and buy a range of different weapons with different statistics (none of which made any difference, as you just counter-killed 95% of the opponents you had to fight). You had a whole range of side-missions to complete, and a wider variety of core missions, but many of the additions sat uncomfortably within the game engine, like how trying to chase people down was unnecessarily awkward due to the way the game's lock-on system worked, and for the few times that stealth was required, the engine's unsuitability for the purpose could be frustratingly evident. However, being able to swim, even in metal armour, was a welcome addition to anyone who fell into the water and watched the unarmoured Altair sink like stone in the first game.

Ezio looks over Monteriggioni in Assassin's Creed 2

For the first game, I was prepared to work with the game, to overlook its shortcomings in pursuit of the experience it offered. By the second, the sheer volume of things to do made progress seem like a chore some times, and the need to leverage game mechanics to expedite progress rather than act in a more realistic manner broke the atmosphere slightly for me. For example, in the first game, I would try and stick with crowds to get close enough to targets to strike, where in the second I completed a lot of assassination missions by just charging up to the target, stabbing him and then running away. I would also just murder a group of guards rather than finding a way around them, safe in the knowledge that I could just rip a few wanted posters from the wall afterwards and there would be no repercussion. This may be because I was more time-constrained playing the sequel than I was when I played the first game, which would make it an unfair criticism, but one I have to level at it regardless.

I also didn't like Ezio as much as Altair, for some reason. True, Altair was an unrepentant, arrogant ass with an inexplicable American accent, but I thought he suited the role of an angel of death, and I didn't really warm to the smirking Italian playboy in the second game as much as I did to the supposedly more one-sided character in the first.

I seem to have been quite negative on Assassin's Creed 2 in this post, which is perhaps a little unfair, as I did enjoy playing it, but for me it lacked some of the magic of its predecessor.