The debut-trailer of Starcraft II – Heart of the Swarm was released by Blizzard.



The expansion also includes the official DotA map for Starcraft 2, the game will be releaed 2012. Features are a whole new singleplayer campaign, as well as units and maps are added to the multiplayer. If you aren't familiar with Starcraft 2, here is a short overview over the game:

Starcraft II isn't the newest game anymore, but it's still being played by millions all over the world.
It was released on the 27th July 2010 by Blizzard following up on “Starcraft – The Brood Wars”. The game also has 2 expansions; “Heart of the Swarm” and “Legacy of Void” which are not released yet though. Considering it was announced 3 years earlier it did not take as long as many other games did to actually appear on the market, even though there is a 10 year time gap between the appearance of Starcraft I and II.
It is one of the most popular games in the whole world selling over 3 million times in the first few months – and not to forget the illegal copies.

Gameplay:
The game can be played in different combinations ranging from a simple 1vs1 to 4vs4 or even a free for all.
The campaign offers you over 48 hours of intense gameplay and an interesting storyline to follow. Not to forget you can choose which missions you undertake, which side you want to fight for making the campaign fun to play more than once.
You have 3 races to choose from at the start of every multiplayer game:

Terran:
Human exiles from earth, them having basic units like marines, machines like siege tanks and airplanes.

Zerg:
An alien race consisting of a multitude of super-species of assimilated life forms, having only living units, not machines of any kind.

Protoss:
A highly developed alien race having strong mental powers having basic units like protoss warriors, machines like robot worms and flying units like the protoss carries.


There are many different tactics in this game, but the main aim is still to destroy your enemy, you do this by destroying all buildings that are able to produce units, and all units that are able to construct buildings.
You start with a main building and 5 “miners” different for each race. You have 2 different resources, minerals and vespine gas. Minerals is the main resource and is needed to build basic units etc while vespine gas is needed for developing and producing advanced units.
You start harvesting resources and expanding your base. Now the question is if you want to build a second base and push up your resources or build a small army up very fast. Every tactic can be countered and often players only have milliseconds to decided what to do.
The problems that appeared with this game was one that had not been seen before – there is no LAN feature. LAN (Local Area Network) basically means playing offline together, 2 or more computers connected to each other without the use the internet. This is causing the game to be less attractive for “professional players” because as seen in some tournaments, which have to be played over battle-net, there often is delay or even players dropping making the whole experience worse and even “manipulates” games.

All in all Starcraft II is a very nice game though, it merges old and new concepts, giving an interesting single player campaign and a huge amount of possibilities online, along with the editor.