StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty

Thankfully, the units are all strikingly designed - both visually and tactically - impeccably balanced, and perhaps more to the point, extremely cool. Crisp art, exquisite animation, potent sound, exciting special skills - burrowing Zerg! transforming mechs! - and Blizzard's willingness to match overpower with overpower, refusing to neuter even the most basic building-block like the Marine: the great thing about StarCraft II's unit design is that, while considering the daunting balance demands of eSport, it has remembered to be fun.

That even extends to base units that can retract into the ground (Terrans can construct gates and walls out of supply depots) or take to the air to flee an attack or settle near a new mining opportunity. The map designs - the game comes with dozens, doubtless soon to be fleshed out by the game's fanbase - exploit multiple levels of elevation with cunning, making the pathing abilities of various units a crucial consideration and widening the gap between air and ground forces. Even if you concentrate on only one of the three races, StarCraft II presents an extremely supple and fluid strategic landscape.

Helping you cope with this are countless small improvements to an otherwise tried-and-true user interface (being able to set a rally point to a moving unit, thus automatically resupplying your front lines, is a huge plus, for example). Learning these and the countless shortcuts you will need to successfully manage the briskly shifting and accumulating facets of a StarCraft II game is essential. But, in a way, the UI itself simply becomes another layer of complexity you have to master.

It's all just a bit much, and despite the great and admirable lengths Blizzard has gone to to help you learn the ropes, there can be no changing that. StarCraft II is, at heart, still an uncompromised and uncompromising hardcore RTS with a resolute focus on micro-management speed. Even in an easy match it's tense and stressful, and not a crack has been left open for luck to enter the equation; this a pure skill environment, hermetically sealed from the forces of chance. That's a vital stipulation for dedicated players, but a tough break for the newcomer who needs a stroke of luck, just one, to feel like he or she might have a foothold in the game.

So Blizzard might still find that a very large percentage of players drop away before they even participate in their first ladder league (the superb matchmaking system that pitches players against each other in small, closely-fought groups, even as they play in a wider pool, which I predict will be the most-copied piece of multiplayer game design this decade). In fact, many won't even try the first of their 50 Practice League matches, never mind get through them.

If that does happen, it won't be because of the new Battle.net, a robust gaming platform that easily matches or exceeds Steam and Xbox Live for features and polish, fitted here to a bespoke and extremely slick StarCraft II front-end. It's a major component of this release and it seems unfair to gloss over Battle.net so quickly - but that's partly a compliment to its transparency, and partly down to the fact that its charms will only reveal themselves over time and through its gradual integration with World of Warcraft and, eventually, Diablo III.

No, if players drop away, it will be because Blizzard has done absolutely everything it can to make StarCraft easier to get into except changing it. Was there room to expand its range without dumbing (or slowing) it down? Maybe. Would that have been the right thing to do? Probably not. Because the hardcore fans would have been cheated, the eSports scene destabilised, the world robbed of a cutting-edge competitive strategy game.