StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm

StarCraft II, released in July 2010, is the sequel to Blizzard's award-winning strategy game StarCraft. In the 26th century, three species, the Terrans, Protoss, and Zerg, are at war. The campaign takes you through many missions on different planets where you have to face various enemy factions or, sometimes, several of them at once. StarCraft II features a similar number of units—some of them new—as the original game. Due to the massive success of the first game, Blizzard chose to focus a large aspect of the game on multiplayer combat through Battle.net. The campaign serves as a good introduction to units and concepts, but the real action is in competitive multiplayer combat.

The StarCraft II engine only supports DirectX 9, but several patches have improved rendering quality and available options considerably. We tested the game using a recorded 1 vs. 1 multiplayer replay in the late-game phase. Please note that StarCraft II is very CPU limited on high-end cards, especially on lower resolutions, so you may not see much scaling between some cards. StarCraft II does not support multi-monitor gaming because it would provide an unfair advantage in competitive multiplayer, as a larger portion of the map would be visible.