I’ve now played StarCraft 2 for two days. I’ve finished five missions on the single-player campaign, and played a handful of co-op multiplayer games. If you had asked me to describe the game based on the Beta, I would have said it was just StarCraft HD. Higher resolution, more beautiful, some new tech, but the gameplay is identical. The single player campaign, though, is where this game really shines. The original StarCraft’s single player was essentially a series of levels that got steadily harder and had some story connecting them. The sequel turns makes the stages non-linear, introduces credits as reward for some stages that you can then use to hire mercenary units when you’re in a bind for near-instant help or spend on research to improve units, and secondary objectives in some missions allow you to earn alien research points you can use to improve buildings. The original game only had ten Terran missions, and I’m willing to bet there are triple that in this game. Plus there are probably seven hundred achievements.
The multiplayer is fun, but you kinda need to be a semi-professional to do well at it. As Splatta said the other day, that seems too much like work.