So a friend of mine (who will remain nameless at the moment) let me in on his beta account so I could check out Starcraft 2, and… well.. it’s a little underwhelming. Of course I think it’s still kind of early in the beta, so perhaps there’s a lot more good stuff coming.
But the 3D effects are almost a waste! You could be forgiven for thinking it’s just Brood War at a higher resolution, the zoom in/out is really limited in scope and unless I was doing it wrong it looks like there’s no ability to rotate. It looks almost like it’s the WC3 engine with SC sprites.
Contrast this to something like Spring/Total Annihilation – which is well over a decade old and has had this kind of stuff all along, and it’s easy to see where I’m coming from. Play some of the cooler spring mods, then switch to SC2 and SC2 is about as exciting as your Uncle Joe’s jeans.
The game itself is pretty though, if you lower your expectations, and it’s classic Starcraft really. If I got a new PC (mine doesn’t quite have enough CPU and freezes periodically during games) I’d probably buy it, but it’s not entirely what I was expecting.