Review by: Tom Chick

Today, I feel sorry for the developers of real time strategy games. Particularly really good ones. You worked your butts off to make a game in a once-glorious genre fallen on hard times. Maybe you crafted a haunting minimalist sleeper like Multiwinia or a flat-out work of genius like Rise of Legends. Perhaps you used a popular license as a license to innovate and, voila!—Dawn of War 2. Maybe you had an Endwar revolution and no one showed up. Perhaps you hid a fantastic RTS in a charming open world game like Brutal Legend or stealthed it onto the Wii with an unassuming title like Swords & Soldiers. You might have reworked a popular mod into something special with its own unique identity, calling it Demigod. However you managed it, you were doing the yeoman's work of not just keeping the genre alive, but keeping it lively.

And then along comes Blizzard, dumping its RTS onto the scene like an avalanche. Here it is! Massive, expensive, online, unimaginative, slick, marketed to Kingdom Come, skating on the popularity of an old franchise that didn't have the grace to die out. It's an 800-lb. zombie gorilla riding a sled down a hill ten years long and World of Warcraft high and slamming into your carefully crafted snowman. Starcraft II has arrived and now you are even more forgotten than you were before. And the punchline is that unlike what you made, Starcraft II isn't even a great game.

Don't get me wrong. Starcraft II is a fine game. It's just not great. Instead, it's big, competent, traditional, and immaculately packaged. I love it not because it's better than any of the games I just mentioned, but because I'm a dyed-in-the-wool RTS wonk who also loved Armies of Exigo and Dragonshard.

Its first priority is tradition. Starcraft II is reverent to a fault. A lot of it is stuff from the original game. The same three asymmetrical sides, each distinct, each fleshed out with a variety of ways to play. A canny balance of simple and complicated gameplay. An emphasis on economy where killing peons is what is best in life. Accommodating and almost obsequious to the online community. A good skirmish AI if you're not into that community. And a long single-player campaign with a hackneyed space story. All these things were in the original game and Blizzard would have been foolish not to provide them again.