At least 85 percent of those complaints have to do with single-player, which is maybe 20 percent of the overall experience. It's an RTS, not a single-player roleplaying game, even if some of the single-player content is arguably good. If you want to see what the SC2 engine is capable of in terms of producing hard-fought battles with fast-paced gameplay and strategy, try playing in the diamond league or watching a few matches.
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- Early campaign sucks. Where's the epic storyline? Feels like filler to beef up the mission count.
Storylines tend to be a little slow to start. It's, you know, to build suspense. Still, some of the earlier missions were decent. I particularly liked the convoy escort and a couple of the early defense ones. Basic and easy especially on normal, but still nice for getting people acquainted with the game.
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- Impact of the environment on units is weak at best. C&C Generals and COH have much better RTS experiences in this regard.
Environment? You mean in terms of terrain and manuvering around it, or general physics?
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- No ability for units to assume a defensive posture. COH shines in this department.
The problem with this is that there's already plenty of mechanisms in the game to take advantage of. It's not like there's any shortage of things to click. Exchange "defensive posture" buttons for something like a sentry shield button along with other abilities and you have what amounts to conceptually the same idea.
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- Unit AI is terrible. Groups with complex makeup lack any formation whatsoever. I consistently have problems with tropper groups where the medics are at the front of the pack when I try to organize them into a strong base defense. Games all the way back to Praetorians allowed me to organize this much better. A simple facing mechanism would be nice.
I will agree a facing mechanism would be nice, but this isn't a Total War game. A few other faster-paced RTS's did allow this, but most of them have units on a massive scale with slower-paced gameplay than SC2 has. What's more, it allows for people to expand on their micromanagement skills and use the macro interface. It's much more simplistic to have a mechanism that automatically puts your medics in the back than it is to manually control them with a macro to target every medic in the group, and it allows for a certain micromanagement skillset to shine along with the player's reaction time.
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- Graphic performance is *horrible*. Cutscene/ship scenes have sound stuttering. While playing a mission, after 10 minutes my framerate drops to garbage. If I save and reload the game immediately, it's fixed for another 10-15 minutes.
This sounds like a performance issue with your computer, I would get it checked. I haven't had a single instance of framerate problems or stuttering during any scene or part of the gameplay. I have had battle.net lag during multiplayer, but it seems like after the mad rush most of that has stopped.
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- On normal difficulty, it's extremely easy to create an absolutely impenetrable fortress. Computer AI is so terrible it can't even organize a tank rush effectively. There's also so many resources available right at your base to just wait out the trickled in attacks by the AI and create an unstoppable force, at which point I win.
Well, I'd imagine so, normal difficulty is a cakewake. Plus, Terrans are masters of the "impenetrable fortress" base, but good luck making one against any seasoned player.. and on higher difficulty such as Brutal. Earlier missions are obviously going to compound the easymode with this.
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- There's hardly any new units over SC1, but it doesn't matter, because all you need to do is create a huge group of seige tanks with a few mechs for anti air and you can obliterate literally everything. Base destruction becomes moving your tanks into the area, setting up seige mode and then within about 10 seconds, the entire base is gone.
There are close to the same amount of units(I think slightly more in SC2), but I think the difference comes down to diversity of abilities and upgrades for each. There's a surprising amount of stuff to micromanage at the endgame level, especially during long games. I tend to think that's mostly due to the fact that there are more abilities, as well as the diversity and uses for each of them. A lot of the old units were replaced with similar units - but a closer examination reveals that they fulfill only parts of their former unit's roles - in some cases excelling *more* for certain roles but doing more poorly for others.
As I said, good luck making your standard build beyond normal difficulty, or more importantly multiplayer. It's a pretty poor standard to judge the game on. Next up, Mario 3 sucks because level 1 was beaten in 30 seconds.
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- Hero units lack depth. Hero units don't level up, and don't collect items to make them more powerful. Warcraft 3 did a great job with this. Maybe it's coming later in the campaign, but I doubt it.
Pretty sure Blizzard stated that this was intentional. Hero units in WC3 detracted from base-building and strategic elements, and focused a little too much on a simplistic micromanagement of a few elite units to win the game for you. Personally I welcome the change, and it reflects better on the enjoyment that was the original SC as well as WC2.
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- Missions in WC3 were epic and long. When you thought you were through, some new wrinkle would get thrown in and you'd have even more to do. The early campaign here has none of this. The bonus objectives aren't exciting, they are "go to this part of the map and collect this thing".
A few of the later campaigns are pretty long and drawn out, as well as having a few twists and turns "just when you think it's over". There weren't any "exciting" bonus objectives in WC3 either.
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- Voice acting is mostly terrible. Tychus and Tosh in particular are cliched and predictable. But the Protoss units aren't even intelligible during missions.
Those two in particular are supposed to be cliche and predictable. Tosh with the Jamaican dreadlocks, and Tychus as the bored jailbreaker. I think there's maybe one scene where I didn't understand what a Protoss said. I'd call most of the voice acting so-so - nothing to write home about, but not horrible either.
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- Last but not least, I've always thought the Marines were a direct ripoff of Warhammer 40k's space marines. What I love about this game is that they even ripped off the name of the most famous WH40k space marine, Horus, by naming Mengsk's big general Horus.
Blizzard does this all the time, and it's always been intended as more of a tribute than a ripoff. IIRC, when SC1 was first released there wasn't much talk of Warhammer RTS games for the computer. Anyway, there are plenty of examples where Blizz references pop culture and the like in almost all of its games.
