I promise: this is the last post about Starcraft 2 for a while

I finally beat the campaign, and it was a glorious ending! That sure was a tough final mission, though. I felt like the difficulty helped make it feel epic, and therefore fitting... but boy am I glad to finally have it behind me.

Now on to hard difficulty! Ugh, or maybe I'll take a few days off. Raynor's given his Raiders some R&R for a job well done. Maybe even more than well done... maybe burnt. Maybe even charred.

So, my final thoughts now that I've dabbled in the multiplayer and finished the singleplayer: Overall, the single player experience is a very fun and well-created campaign experience that would bear at least two play-throughs, and possibly more depending on your personality. Once you complete the campaign, there's plenty of challenge missions that help prepare you for multiplayer by familiarizing you with various units and counters, along with more advanced strategies.

When you're finally ready, you can hop into the beginner's league and play 50 unranked matches that give you a feel for how to play online. They include a very cool utility at the end of a match; you can see your opponents build order, along with income rates and troop production/army strength.

Players that actually care about getting better can reverse engineer a better strategy and incorporate it into their own. Even better, replays are very easy to save and watch now, giving you the perfect opportunity to study strategies that have proven more effective than your own.

Although multiplayer seems to be fairly well balanced, it is still the 90's insofar as actions-per-minute are what wins a battle. It is all about micromanagement, and that doesn't particularly appeal to me. I'll likely wile away most of my hours on Battle.net in the comfortable embrace of the use-map-settings category. Already there are plenty of impressive game-types, including tower defense and even a first-person-shooter mod!

Truly, what we'll see done using the Starcraft 2 map editor is going to be a veritable wealth of tangible fun. I can't wait to see what happens in the coming months.