Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty

Traditional and fresh in all the right ways, this strategy sequel is an absolute joy for veterans and newcomers alike.

The Good

Campaign offers a lot of variety
Awesome cinematics and great voice acting get you involved in the story
Element of choice gives campaign lots of replay value
Excellent online play featuring three disparate but balanced factions
Challenges and practice league ease neophytes into competitive play.

The Bad

Some Battlenet inconveniences
Only one campaign

Some sequels radically reinvent what has come before; others simply buff up a formula that already soars. To suggest that Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty does only the latter and not the former would be to sell short the fresh ideas and exciting gameplay that makes this superb real-time strategy sequel so enjoyable. This package delivers more than simple fun--it serves up incredible amounts of variety, from the cinematic and multifaceted campaign to the competitive and tightly balanced multiplayer. You might scoff at the fact that the game only includes a single campaign and, perhaps, at the high price point (the game retails at $59.99; $10 higher than the average PC game). But these are nitpicks, forgivable quibbles in a high-quality game that provides plenty of bang for the buck. Starcraft II is the natural next step for the series: it both embraces and updates the core components that made the first game a huge hit while layering on important features that give the game endless replay value, both online and off. This is one of the finest real-time strategy games in years, and whether you're new to the genre or have been studying Protoss build orders for the past decade, there's something here to delight you.