So yesterday I come home late and check my emails before going to bed and it turns out I got into the SC2 beta.

Blizzard has decided to lift the NDA, which means that I can post screenshots and write a few rants.

So despite the fact that it was late and that I had to wake up early next morning, the geek in me couldn't suppress the desire to play some Starcraft 2 for the better part of the night. So I patiently waited for the 1.64 GB client to download and I jumped in.

My history with Starcraft: I was a Warcraft 2 nutter, and at some point a friend showed me this game called Starcraft that was basically Warcraft in space with completely unique races. I instantly fell in love with it. For the record, I still prefer the Warcraft series; but Starcraft is right up there as one of my favourite RTS. I played it for countless hours, single player campaign and sprawling multiplayer games alike. Then came the era of the "UMS", which stands for "use map settings". These were the special kind of maps like RPGs, tower defences, etc. My favourite race was protoss, but I was pretty bad with them so I played mostly terran (with whom I could actually win sometimes). All in all, I played Starcraft quite a lot. Not as much as Warcraft 2 and 3, but still.

So Starcraft 2. The first thing I did was to jump into a game against the CPU, so that I can at least understand the basics and learn which buildings make which units and so on.

Verdict after a few hours: unimpressed.

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The first thing I noticed is that Starcraft 2 is very, very similar to Starcraft 1. That might sound obvious, but given Blizzard's history with Warcraft I expected more change. SC2 to SC1 is pretty much WC2 to WC1, not WC3 to WC2. It's the same core gameplay. Based on a couple of hours of playtime, I would even go as far as to say that this is Starcraft 1 with better graphics and a couple of extra bells. It's kind of like playing The Sims 2 after The Sims 1.

The new dragoon. Reminds me of Elder Nadox. Note that the zoom in feature is like in Warcraft 3. You can also rotate the screen 90 degrees on both sides. In fact, it really feels like the SC2 is running on WC3's engine (minus the hero system of course).

It's not a carbon copy though. It is kind of different in a way. But these differences come from different units, not a different gameplay. For example, terrans get these Boba Fett wannabes with jetpacks. They can jump over cliffs, which opens up quite a few possibilities. Also, massing the same unit seems to be a less viable strategy this time around and you need to mix up a bit (certain units get some bonuses against some unit types, kind of like the damage/armour system of Warcraft 3). But beyond things like that, it's the same game. Heck, even the art is the same, but in a Warcraft 3 -inspired cartoon 3D.

Terran base. If you've played SC1, you can easily recognise the starport, armory, factory, barracks and engineering bay. An interesting thing to note are the supply depots (farms): you can "lower" them into the ground so that units can pass over them. Kind of cool. 2 of them are under the factory in the picture.

Big protoss robot going down a cliff.

Performance wise, it's acceptable. I was surprised to see that I couldn't really handle graphics above medium though. I don't have a Nasa computer, but considering that my card can still handle games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 with textures on high, I'm not sure I understand why I end up with a game that looks like Warcraft 3. But I don't really care about these things anyway.

Zerg queen (reworked into a base support unit in SC2) taking a crap. She's actually creating a "creep tumor", which expands the creep. They're basically the new creep colonies.

As for the new Battle.net, not all the features are available yet. It looks pretty but... I don't know. It seems a bit complicated for no reason. Apparently, there won't be any chat channels and the chat box in custom games is super small. It's a bit hard to figure out how retail will be since there are a bunch of greyed out features, but so far I can't say it's particularly impressive. From the looks of it, Blizzard is more concerned about achievement epeen factor than functionality. Some people on the beta boards are calling it battlefacebook.net.

The nuke is no longer a tiny red dot, making it trivial to spot. To compensate, it homes much quicker than it did in SC1.

Overall, Starcraft 2 seems like a good game. It has the traditional Blizzard "quick to learn, hard to master" fingerprints all over its face and I'm sure people who like competitive gaming on battle.net will spend hundreds of hours in that game. That said, it is rather underwhelming. Blizzard used to blow me away with all of their releases, but this time it seems like they played it too safe. Right off the bat, it feels a bit like a step backwards to only have 3 races. The fact that so little has changed as far as core gameplay goes also leaves a bit of a bittersweet taste. I haven't seriously played any RTS since Warcraft 3, but I'm not so sure if Starcraft 2 will destroy the competition like SC1 and WC3 did. Some companies are coming up with more original concepts these days (Sins of a Solar Empire for instance).

Next up: I'll start going against human opponents, checking the new matchmaking feature.