Personally, I thought the campaign took a nosedive in its "final" story arc.  The cinematic budget got overblown, the story dissolved into the main characters making macho speeches, and the missions became bland and unsatisfying.  Given how strong the campaign was early, it was an underwhelming end.  The final mission was a big disappointment; basically a glorified game of whack-a-mole with nydus worms spontaneously popping up across your base.  No real strategy, just spam units and move them around to deal with the new attack wave that popped up.

I lost interest in playing the campaign (which was great) after playing the campaign. But like i said before, this is a multiplayer game. I have MUCH interest in playing this game multiplayer.

Ironic someone calling that gameplay dated on a forum for a game that uses a battle system similar to games that came out 17 years ago.\

Whoops didnt look at the fact is was in the general forums area and not elemental.

what are the min specs for playing sc2 on highest settings?

I'd say right about what I have. AMD Phenom 9950, GTX260 896MB. I am down to 2GB of RAM from a stick going south. I can run on ultra but some of the later more "busy" missions it'll tell me to lower my gfx settings and gets a lil slow. I think with 4GB of RAM though it would be peachy.

That final Allin mission became a lot easier when i started ignoring the worms and just massed siege tanks right behind the artifact. Built like three factories and pumped those out, placed them where they could reach anything trying to go up the ramps on either side. Then built a pile of those psy emitters and flame turrets(forgot what they're called) around the artifact itself. hit the artifact right as kerrigan was on her way and had a ball of marines meet her on whatever side she was coming from since she could only take them out one or two at a time and they focused her down quickly.

I haven't done my brutal playthrough yet (left off a couple missions shy of the end on my hardmode achievements run), but unless brutal is far, far harder than hard, you should be able to do it with fully upgraded M&M spam. On hard you can easily bottle the protoss up in their base (the feat of strength is pretty tough to do on hard though due to the spawning in of new attack waves right on top of you).

The AI on welcome to the jungle always follows the same order in the terrazine wells it tries to cap, so you should be able to get your blob to the right place before they do. Don't try harvesting any yourself until you have complete map control.

There are colossi on hard as well.

At one of the terrazine altars on hard and brutal there's a stalker on the high ground that will attack you if you start harvesting. It's guarded by an entire base so you have to put you army right next to your scv and just let them take the hits. It really isn't that bad, but it made me start laughing while I was trying to get the "It's so easy!" achievement. 

Oh, and pretty much half of the brutal missions can be done by completing all other optional missions, getting all the upgrades, then tackling it and reloading

Great campaign, great game overall. I was close to start learning how to make maps and modding it in general, then i noticed that Blizz screens all the mods and "copyrighted content" was among the stuff that is denied. I assumed that this applies to other franchise total conversions (ultimate goal) and decided that i'll wait until i know for sure. Which may take months at least, years probably. Yeah. Without knowledge whether the ultimate goal is possible, i don't even care to learn how-to in case the goal is possible.

With that and the fact i got stuck in a mission on Hard somehow turned my SC2 drive off. Might be the fact i played the beta earlier. Didn't get to MP in the final game. Too fast games. I would play it if was on Normal speed, Faster setting requires way too much mouse dexterity. I can do either macro OR micro, not both. Losing games because i can do only one well at time doesn't make me want to learn to do both, it makes me want to quit. Yeah, there's AMM that tries to match you so that you get 50-50 record but how long does it take before that starts happening?

If only the Zerg Queen wasn't such a boring and tedius must do or lose thing. Then i'd probably play since i really like Zerg. Choose a mass of units, attack move. Well maybe not that simple at least i don't have to micro that one ghost to nuke something or such.

Speaking of the Zerg, can't wait for the HotS and the continued campaign. The plot may have not been the most original but it was entertaining and gripping. Fun and good mission desing helped of course.

Well I'm disappointed. 

Not one professional review mentioned the broken state of zerg for MP.  After all that beta there should be no excuse.  Ticks me off to see them be so critical with some games and then completely overlook something as terrible as this.  The tedious macro mechanics (spawn tumor every 15 secs, never mind the larva), almost no unit synergy, lack of clear late game strategy against terran, high apm requirements, few strategic options mostly due to reactionary design, a few other metagame balance complaints, and in general UNFUN gameplay.

It's clear zerg got the least beta time attention.  Maybe it's time the whole game reviewing industry got reviewed.

Edit:  How can Blizzard expect to sell Heart of the Swarm first expansion when the star faction is broken to the point of being unfun?

Fruitdealer, as you're obviously referring to, vastly outplayed his opponent.  His Actions Per Minute peaked at around 500, while his opponent peaked at around 280, and his ability to Micro-manage his unit's targets in combat was simply awe-inspiring.  While APM is not the definning characteristic nor sole determining factor of victory, being able to do nearly twice as much at the same time as your opponent is probably a good place to start.  The fact that the Zerg player had to perform his actions nearly twice as fast as his opponent to win - and he didn't steam roll his opponent, it was a hard fight - should hint at something being 'off'.  I presume all Zerg issues will be corrected with the expansion pack, all for a mere US$60.00.

I find it interesting that no professional reviewer mentioned the pathetic story or its lack of continuity.  Short of simply re-booting the series, Starcraft II's story spent more time avoiding anything resembling a plot than it did doing, well, anything.  The gameplay is fun because Starcraft was fun; the best parts of the game are those that most closely resemble it's predessor.  The fact that no professional reviewer appears to have taken it into consideration with scoring the game makes me think their might be an issue worth noting.

Well, that is leaving this mission very late. Generally speaking any mission you leave late like that is trivialized just because you have way more advanced units than it was designed for.

I think they're probably just waking up to this one right now.  I'm several standard deviations above the "average" gamer, and I can barely handle Zerg, and even then it took me several weeks longer than it took to get comfortable with the other factions. The easiest improvement they could make is putting the Queen's larva generating ability on autocast.  It's a trivial "spam as soon as you can" ability, which is really a poster-boy for abilities that should have autocast available.

Broken doesn't just refer to balance, it can also refer to gameplay and mechanics.  For a 500 APM pro-leaguer, zerg is perfectly playable.  For a 60 APM average gamer, Zerg is completely unplayable currently.  As  I said, I'm well above average and I still have trouble with them.

The fact is if we're talking about the experiences of an average gamer, the experiences of a pro-league tournament are utterly irrelevant.

Personally I'd say WC3 is my pick for "best RTS of all time", but SC2 doesn't even make my top 5 in its current state.  Blizzard has a good track record of post-release support, so it could pull ahead of the pack, but it's got a lot of ground to make up.

While zerg seems limited with very few viable paths to fight off early game aggression, once you get to mid game they start becoming a beast. The mechanics definitely takes some getting used to though, but they way they work overall can also make them the most fun to play. I really wish instead of making zerg easier to play they would do something to make the other races a little more mechanically intensive to play to bring them on par. Terran does seem like easy street with toss being somewhere in the middle right now.

I love the old APM arguments. While the way things worked in BW rewarded high APM more it is really not as needed in SC2. I have argued that the APM counter needs to have a way to show effective APM not just useless spam. I have been able to articially boost my APM to over 200 average, but i still suck and actually play better when it is only 60. A friend i play with who is 3rd in his diamond division like me refuses to spam APM for no reason and ends up with an average in the 40s most games. He also is very effective at playing any of the races like that. APM, at least for SC2 is mainly just one of those buzzwords the kids like to throw out to make themselves sound 1337.