The hotly anticipated StarCraft II is the just the same Blizzard strategy game you know and love, with one important difference - it's had a decade's worth of effort and an enormous pile of WOW-won money thrown an it.Īs a result, any thought that it might seem a bit old-fashioned flies out of the window - it's simply the slickest PC game you've ever seen, and it's been polished to a high sheen. The world's moved on, but Blizzard hasn't.

It's been seven years since Blizzard's last strategy release, though - indeed, seven years since it did anything that wasn't WOW. Transporting Blizzard's high-speed, click-tastic micro-management strategy style from a fantasy to a sci-fi setting, StarCraft was a global smash and its multiplayer became almost a national sport in South Korea, where players capable of 300 actions per minute (that's five clicks a second!) enjoy sponsorship and big prize payouts from televised matches. The original Warcraft trilogy is where it all began, but it was arguably 1998's StarCraft that made the biggest splash.

Back before Blizzard took the world by storm with its monster MMO World of Warcraft, it was best known for its real-time strategy games.