The mission was fairly straightforward: you and some Terran marines, armed and inside battle suits, escort a few ground carriers that are filled with Terrans from their based to the star port. Of course, the Zerg are ready with their own ground troops that stage hit and run attacks. They also have air units that spew out some kind of dangerous gook.

Overall the campaign mission was a simple one and certainly one that's early in the StarCraft II campaign. Yet the production values from Blizzard are clearly evident. The character animations are great, the art textures for the game's maps are solid and over all it's just what we would expect in a Blizzard game. It's perhaps not the best looking game ever made but that's OK.
We also got a chance to briefly try out the game's skirmish mode. We put it on random and found ourselves playing as the Protoss with the Zerg as our opponent. Skirmish mode is also fairly straightforward for an RTS game; gather your resources, build structures and make your offensive and defensive units. Because it's the Protoss we were "warping in" structures rather than technically building them but that's just quibbling.

Naturally we got ourselves smashed up pretty good by the Zerg but at least we got a chance to check out some of the new ground and flying units from both sides. Otherwise, it looked and played like a well designed RTS game.

If we sound like we are a little disappointed with StarCraft II, we have to say that we aren't. Blizzard knows its audience and we think, particularly in skirmish and multiplayer modes, that if they deviated greatly from the formula of the first game lots of folks will be upset. We do think there will be more freedom to do stuff differently in the single player campaign and having attended the StarCraft II art panel at BlizzCon we know that the development team has lots of plans for big single player maps that simply couldn't be done in a multiplayer level.

The biggest unknown factor about StarCraft II is Battle.net. Even though we got info about the next generation of Blizzard's multiplayer service at BlizzCon, it;s also clear that Battle.net won't just be a matchmaking service for the game. With things like achievements, stats tracking, social networking, mod and third part map support and more, StarCraft II could rise above the typical RTS game with this service behind it. Hopefully when the multiplayer beta begins we will get to play and see more about what Blizzard has in store for the sequel to one of the biggest PC games of all time.
%Gallery-70710