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I have now finished the single player campaign (on 'normal' difficulty, I'm a wuss.....) - overall, still a solid 8/10 but if anything I think it goes off the boil a little bit towards the end.
Here is a list of good and bad things about the game, conveniently placed into two categories.
STARCRAFT -
Graphics do not maketh the game, but SC2 is truly a magnificent visual experience. It's everything you dreamed RTS games might actually look like one day, whilst playing the original C&C at 320x200 as the crappy little stick men jiggled across the screen.
Sound and music are equally epic. When it all kicks off, your head will want to explode with happiness, a bit like early ecstasy experiences before you inevitably end up taking ten in a night and feel like wanting to die for the next week.
Faultless production values in every department, the entire game just works, no bugs, no glitches, nothing about it is annoyingly clunky or awkward - and anything you don't like can almost certainly be customised.
It's Starcraft again, but dialled up to AWESOME in every way.
The tech trees and credit system allow you to customise your base structures and units' stats/abilities to make stuff work very much how you want it to, geared more towards an offensive or defensive style, using the lighter but nimbler units more, or the heavier kick-ass units more, and so on.
The mercenaries are pretty cool.
The 'use a small finite force to complete several objectives' missions that I usually hate in RTS games, are especially well done and really good fun - made more so by the excellent AI of your forces.
The AI in general is excellent, are very rarely leaves you shouting 'NO NOT THAT YOU STUPID FUCKING COMPUTER!' at your screen.
At its most involved and exciting, it's absolutely as good an RTS game as I've ever played.
ARSESHAFT -
The story are characters are, in the final analysis, a bit rubbish. I clung desperately to the notion that it was all ironic or perhaps gently poking fun at itself - but as the final single player missions came to a close I was forced to conclude that it did seem to be taking itself seriously. Having the units get annoyed with you if you keep clicking on them for long enough does not compensate for a story and characters that appear to have been vomited out by a 16K ZX Spectrum's automated sci-fi nonsense generator. This is the same generator that came up with Independence Day and The Phantom Menace, just so we all understand how feeble it is.
It's Starcraft again, but FUCKED AROUND WITH! There are precious few missions in the game where you're able to consolidate a position, build up your forces, get all your research done - and then go out and kick ass on your own terms. Time after time it chucks in gimmicky new units that you'll only ever use on that one mission, or there is a super unit that can practically do the whole level by itself, or there are timed events that you have to race against, or you're left simply having to hold a point for a certain amount of time, and so on. This is Starcraft motherfuckers, let me turtle in and then go and kill everything when I feel like doing so, dammit!
The tech trees and credit system would make more sense if you had any idea about what was coming later on in the game, or indeed, if there were any levels left to play whereby the stuff you were paying for and/or researching would be of any use whatsoever. (A second play through on a harder difficulty level would be required to bring this into its own.)
And on top of that, once you've sunk all your credits/research into particular units/structures/whatever - it makes all the other things which, by definition, you already didn't really like very much, completely redundant as you now don't like them very much AND they're underpowered.
The mercenaries are ultimately useless. (I think I actually needed them once or twice, and that was nothing I couldn't have fixed by going back to my last save and tweaking my base a bit.)
The last mission is shit.
OVERALL -
It's a fabbo game, but in the final analysis I was left a bit disappointed by the single player campaign. Hopefully the Zerg and Protoss instalments will be better, specifically the stories and characters, I have a hunch I'll find it easier to feel affinity with a slimy Zerg overmind than the cigar-sniffing drunkard Jim Raynor, at least you'd expect a Zerg to not be too worried that his entire force has just been wiped out and can therefore start telling shit jokes to his chums again.
I'm working through the single player challenge missions, which seem to be pretty interesting and varied, and local games versus AI opponents are entertaining too - following on from which I may dip my toes into the world of online games against real other people. (Hopefully not a psycho ninja Korean who'll wipe me out in two minutes.....)
Definitely got my money's worth out of it already, but they could have done with getting some of the WoW guys in to help them with the plot. And the script. And the story arc. And the characterisation. And so on.
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