#STARCRAFT II WINGS OF LIBERTY FREE#

The Hyperion is far more than just a giant spaceship with a massive pew-pew laser: it has its own laboratory, armoury, bridge and cantina, with each RPG-lite area presented as a moving image rather than as an interactive environment. Levels are glued together by impressive in-engine cutscenes, the occasional lavish FMV sequence and plenty of pottering about on your ship to spend money and research points – we’ll talk about the latter in a moment. New toys are introduced into the game on a one-by-one basis each mission encourages you to your latest prize to accomplish the demands of each particular scenario. Keeping the narrative grounded to Raynor’s perspective, with the majority of levels based around the Terran race, gives Blizzard’s designers the chance to breathe, to let the game unfold at a more comfortable pace and create levels that bring out the best from each unit.

The former’s campaign, the heart of StarCraft’s burgeoning space opera, has you controlling Raynor’s renegade forces on the Hyperion, his personal Battlecruiser. You’d be wrong.Ĭrucially, there’s an all-important divide between the single and multiplayer components. The StarCraft of 2010 is not the StarCraft of 1998, but it does such a good job of respecting its source material you might end up thinking you’re basically playing the same game. The more things change, the more they stay the same. At night his dreams are haunted by the Zerg rushing his one-time love Sarah Kerrigan, back when she was still human and not an oddly attractive Zerg Queen – one that resembles a cross between Tricia Helfer (who now provides the voice) and the work of H.

#STARCRAFT II WINGS OF LIBERTY FREE#

His waking hours are spent sitting alone in bars, knocking back bottles of whiskey and listening to a cover version of Free Bird. The Protoss homeworld of Aiur had been thoroughly ravaged, an infant Overmind had been destroyed, and renegade Terran hero Jim Raynor was fleeing the might of the oppressive Dominion forces led by backstabbing sod Arcturus Mengsk. When we left off, in 1998, the insectoid Zerg had just betrayed the technologically-advanced Protoss and Terran armies, wiping out all life on planet Char.

Starcraft ii wings of liberty