Customer Reviews

Starcraft II Limited Edition Strategy Guide (Brady Games)

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I purchased this after completing the campaign on casual (I didn't want to risk the story line being ruined) in order to go back and pick up the extra achievements I skipped out on, as well as to read about unit strengths/weaknesses. Overall, I rate this as a worthwhile purchase, however I was a little upset when I began to actually get into the specifics of the campaign.

Although my qualms with this product could certainly be due to Blizzard tweaking the game through updates or last minute changes after this book was published, it is still worth pointing out there will be some slight changes/omissions which I would have assumed were included/accurate. Two which I will point out for reference, are to the "Piercing the Shroud" level, the achievements have the wrong difficulties associated with them, and the maps don't always include locations for all of the achievements (ie, all of Tosh's units for "The Devils Playground").

Overall, it is worthwhile since Amazon is selling it cheaper than all my local competitors, just know that you will still have to google certain things if you don't want to explore everything on your own.

This guide covers the campaign elements decently. The maps and mission briefings are useful, though you can get much the same thing free on the Web. Don't count on it to help you with the achievements, since all the Hard ones are much more difficult than anything this guide covers. The multiplayer section is interesting but again won't replace real experience. The game gets hard quickly, and this guide is relatively basic.

You'll also find plenty of instances of sloppy editing. Sentences are strung together with commas all over the guide. The editor really did a bad job. But on the bright side the visual layout is great. The color photos may inspire you to fight great battles. It's just that nowadays a paper guide has to really shine to out-compete the stuff that's freely available online. That's why I give this one 3 stars.

There's no shortage of info on-line to play SC2, but it's helpful to have it in one spot and be able to reference it occasionally while you play. The information on the campaigns is decent but more specific step-by-step guides are available from Starcraft 2 Liquipedia. Nevertheless, the campaign sections are well laid out. However, the multiplayer section of the book is excellent. It has some helpful pointers on how to play better. I've found the Tech trees very helpful to have in front of me while I play each race randomly in the Co-operative and 1vAI games. Playing Zerg, Terran and Protoss is important to properly understand their strengths and weaknesses. Eventually you won't need it but for new players this book is easily worth the money. As you play, many of the pointers and suggestions it provides will resonate with you better the more you've played, so I find myself referring back and re-reading the player vs player section. I think anyone other than an expert will find the book helpful.

As a top ten rank in Platinum League, I still have a lot to learn from this guide. I'm thrilled at all the new things I haven't known in my best & only race. The book is protected in beautiful hardcover, and I'm surprised that every page is in color with bunch of pictures and demonstrations, which I didn't expect (I thought 400+ pages is too much for color). If you are truly a Starcraft fan, I would suggest you add this to your interest's collection. The quality and effort put into composing this guide is enormous. And even if you feel that you have mastered the game and don't need to learn anything new, it is always good to skim through and read other Starcraft Pros' strategies to see what are other tricks of play is out there.
I would highly recommend this strategy guide to every Starcraft fan, especially when it's sold for only $20 on Amazon ($35 everywhere else).

This is a great strategy guide, it not only listed everything you needed to know to make it through the single player missions successfully it really helped me out personally with ideas on how I should start my games when it came to multiplayer online play. This guide alone has helped me improve my skill in gameplay of Starcraft 2 for single player and even for multiplayer. The fact it helped me improve in my multiplayer play is impressive to me. Most guides don't help with that. It offered a lot of great starting ideas and tricks to key and command usage I was not aware of and it made me all that better.

In my opinion this is a great guide and I recommend it to anyone who loves this game, or is new to it and needs some pointers to give them that edge in multiplayer.

The only thing holding me back from a 5 star review is the fact that the guide doesn't give you tips on getting any of the harder achievements in the game. Other than that it is a very in depth guide to everything else you need to know about the game. Gives good generalized tips on the single player missions, but nothing specific. It's also a great introduction to multi-player. Quite comprehensive in the multiplayer aspect with helpful "Starcraft Pro" tips. Worth picking up overall, especially for those that are newer to starcraft/RTS games.

Its a good guide and much nicer than the regular version and will easily show you how to beat the game and has a lot of multi player info. I was only upset that the single player strategy did not cover how to get all three achievements for each mission. This is frustrating for the hard level achievements where some tips would be truly useful. I have no problem beating this game without the book on normal difficulty and did so, but knowing better strategies to get all the single player achievement would have been much better, I'll think twice before buying this with the next addition to the trilogy...

So glad I purchased this! First of all it looks beautiful--lots of pretty screenshots--and second of all the content is great. The single player guide is what you would expect--shows how to get all the bonus objectives, etc--but the multiplayer guide really stands out, going in to a lot of detail on general strategy and featuring guides to every unit in the game. There are also strategies for specific builds and analysis of some maps, which are less about the specific maps and more about just knowing what to look for. Overall, very high quality. I'd recommend it especially for the rookie Starcraft 2 player.

This guide has a lot of great information. The analysis of the three races and their strengths and weaknesses actually proved insightful and pointed out some overall strategic issues I was not aware of.

The production values are high, the images look great, and the bonus map guide that comes shrink-wrapped with the special edition is pretty keen.

My big issue with the guide is that it is getting its information from one of the last patches of the SC2 beta. According to this guide, Overseers create Infested Terrans, Infestors have Frenzy, and so on. I have not gone through the guide with a fine toothed comb, but those obvious throwbacks to the last patch of the beta stood out.

So, the guide is good... BUT... don't overly trust it every detail of every unit - double check a SC2 wiki, perhaps.

In general, however, I see this as a problem with the video/pc game development cycle, but Brady Games seems to hit this stumbling block a bit more often than Prima.

A mild blight on an otherwise excellent guide.

With about 60% of the guide dedicated to completing the campaign and obtaining achievements, the guide seems to be targeted towards rookies. There was some good info on multiplayer strategies, and the unit breakdowns were informative, but only available in summary format. One thing that this guide lacked was a unit stat/counter in spreadsheet format. Not being able to quickly reference this guide while playing to find out a units strengths/weaknesses without having to read a 2-3 page summary is a serious drawback.