StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty

The Good
It has the excellent gameplay of the original Star Craft: choose one of the well-balanced factions, build up your base, gather vespene gas, build additional pylons, attack the enemy, be victorious or die. And all that in a beautiful environment.

The graphics look stunning. Every unit type can be distinguished well from the others. Some buildings look rather similar, though.

What makes it even more fun than the original is the speed. Everything goes much faster! You no longer need to wait forever to get all techs researched or to build up a descend army.

And the story! It continues the one of Brood Wars and it makes it worth playing the single player campaign, even if you're the multiplayer type of guy. In theory, at least. See below.

The Bad
It's advertised as a full game, but that's not what it is. It's just the Terran campaign, Zerg and Protos will be delivered later - at full price, of course. And don't say "the Terran campaign alone is so long". Developing the game must have taken much more time than creating the campaign, so that's no excuse.

Oh, and you have to pay extra for all the "downloadable premium content". Sure. After you registered your game, stored your savegames online, be online all the time and let Activision mirror your harddrive. Thanks.

Okay, at least I can gather my friends, we all install the game and play. Nope. The spawn function is gone, absolutely everybody has to own a copy. Fine, so everybody gets a copy, we meet, order pizza and start are ready to get going. Still no. Why, you ask? Because there is no LAN function. It's just no there! So you need like half a dozen internet connections at one place. Brilliant, just brilliant.

Sad. But I will be able to play against my buddies from Brazil and Australia, right? Right? Wrong! There's an entirely pointless region code. A region code! I don't believe it!

They ruined the multiplayer function of a game that was a highly anticipated multiplayer game. Yes, they really did.

The Bottom Line
Don't buy this game. Oh, wait, you can't buy it, you can only rent it online, because it's a full-price browser game, so forget what I just said. And forget this game as well.