Near Perfection: Suffers from minor issues
StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is a more than worthy sequel which is years and years ahead of its predecessor. It is beautiful both graphically and in terms of gameplay. However, the story suffers from a few minor issues and the online play isn't picture perfect.
GRAPHICS: 4.5/5. Feel free to deduct 0.5 points for every year of your PC component's age or whatever, cos its not gonna look the same on a crap machine.
To describe the graphics in one word would be.... "STUNNING"
To decribe it in several paragraphs.... with a very high performance machine, you will obviously see something which won't quite make games like Crysis look shit, but it will be extraordinarily pretty nonetheless.
If theres any criticisms I have about the graphics though, its that you need a machine that can perform well and is at most 2 - 3 years old to enjoy this game. Any older, and the game ends up becoming quite choppy in many areas and inherits framerate issues. If you do have graphical problems then you can set the game down to its lowest settings but it looks like a more detailed cartoony version of Warcraft 3 if you do so. Otherwise, the game looks good.
GAMEPLAY: 4/5
The gameplay is second to none, but I only have one massive worry with it. Its that the Campaign mode deals almost exclusively with the Terran race so my worry was that it was going to encourage a lot of Terran players in multiplayer due to the fact that people who finish the Campaign will have the most experience with them.
Turns out thats not quite the case. The problem is that the Campaign has many units that didn't make the cut in Multiplayer. Things such as Medics, Firebats, Vultures etc. You also get a lot of upgrades you could not have in Multiplayer. It feels like the Single Player game is vastly different and won't teach you much.
As for the multiplayer. Just a warning. YOU. WILL. GET. STEAMROLLED. IN. LEAGUE. MATCHES.
BATTLE.NET: 2.5/5
In one word, kinda sucks
In many words. Battle.net has many flaws. For instance, an ignore list is not easily accessible so feel free to have players call you hackers or gaywads cos you zerg rushed them. On the other hand, if you want to talk to friends playing WoW, you need their Real ID, which of course means giving them your f**king account name and email address (which are the same thing on the new battle.net service.) Does anyone else see this as a "slight" security flaw in order to properly friendlist someone and see all of their characters or even talk to them while they're on WoW?
Custom Maps are handled terribly. For starters, its based on "popularity" meaning maps will remain popular and new maps will have little chance of even being recognised. Plus you don't host your own games either.
The league system also places you in different leagues, and when you're in the Bronze League, you pretty much feel useless as you're scraping the bottom of the barrel. League promotion isn't a clear result so its not certain when and if you will be promoted.
In short, they screwed up with battle.net a bit.