Blizzard's StarCraft II Mods: Our Impressions

At BlizzCon this year, Blizzard Entertainment showcased four in-house developed mods for its popular real-time strategy game StarCraft II. Three of the four mods -- StarJeweled, Left 2 Die and Aiur Chef -- are to be released with a patch in the next few months, while the fourth, Blizzard DOTA, will be released at some point after that. We took a little time out from rubbernecking at fully-grown men cosplaying as pink-haired Gnome ladies to give them a whirl.

The Blizzard-developed StarCraft II mod StarJeweled feels like a very loyal remake of PopCap's Bejewelled, probably because it is. It's a match-three game where the more combos you get from lining the jewels up, the more points you earn. There's a twist, though. While the Bejeweled board takes up about half the screen, the other half of the screen is a narrow gauntlet of photon canons bookended by two stone towers. The one furthest south is yours, while your opponent owns the northern one.

Every time you line three or more jewels up, you spawn a marine and earn energy. The marine runs in a straight line until it reaches one of your opponent's photon cannons. It'll start attacking the cannons one by one until it reaches the stone tower. Since photon cannons tend to kill marines in a single shot, so you'll need to spend the energy you earn on stronger units. The units you can purchase range from zealots all the way up to ultralisks. There's no race restriction in StarJeweled; the range of units you can spawn span all the Protoss, Terran and Zerg.

The game is pretty simple until you add in an opponent who is spawning units that make a beeline straight for you. The idea is to earn enough energy to overwhelm your opponent, and focus on spawning units that can destroy the photon cannons and counter anything your opponent tries to send at you. The demo we played was pretty fun, but didn't have the immediate lasting appeal that the core StarCraft II multiplayer or many of its other mods have.

Then there's Left 2 Die -- a tongue-in-cheek parody of Valve's excellent Left 4 Dead series. It's a modification of the zombie level "Outbreak" from the single player campaign, except now your base is split in two and you have an ally. At night, when the zombies come, you'll occasionally be hit by some "special infected" that are extremely reminiscent of the special zombies from L4D. The names -- Kaboomer, Choker and so on -- and even the way they attack and move are all a pretty obvious homage.

Killing these special infected or the structures will earn you "biomass" to spend at a shared science facility to access special units. Without spending biomass, you are restricted to building vultures, marines and mauraders, but the science facility opens up more than a dozen other units, such as the medic and siege tank, and building upgrades like the tech reactor. This game mode felt pretty limited, but we see potential in the structure and would like to see it applied to brand new maps.

Aiur Chef is a little more flexible. In Aiur Chef, we took the role of a murloc chef. A voice-acted introduction does a decent job of parodying the opening moments of Iron Chef, and introduces the "theme ingredient", which is an item that all of your recipes must include. Then you and your opponents are on your way.

You have three 'recipes' laid out on the left of the screen that each use a combination of ingredients found across the map. Next to each recipe is an amount of points. The idea is that you lead your little murloc across the map in search of the ingredients for your recipes. Usually, they will be found by slaying a creature. Collecting infestor bits, for example, involves dicing up a living infestor. You have six slots at the bottom of the playfield that serve as your inventory, and each ingredient you collect takes up one spot.

Running to the middle after you've collected enough ingredients for one of your recipes lets you 'cook' it, which earns you points, and often an extra bonus of some sort. We were rewarded with an item that would make all the other murlocs -- our opponents -- dance uncontrollably, but there are others. Now, although we didn't actually get to try it, we assume that you can attack your opponents and stop them from collecting items. There are multiple rounds, and the winner for each round is determined by whoever has the most points by the end of the five minutes.

Blizzard DOTA is the mod that we, and likely the rest of the StarCraft II-playing world, are most excited for. It's a faithful recreation of the team-based mob-killing Warcraft III mod that became popular enough to warrant several retail recreations, except this one includes heroes from all three of Blizzard's biggest franchises. If you've ever wondered who would win in a brawl between Warcraft's Sylvannas and StarCraft's Kerrigan, we say to you "go outside and make some friends," but also, "Blizzard DOTA can answer that for you maybe!"

DOTA, for the uninitiated, stands for Defense of the Ancients, which has absolutely nothing to do with what the game actually involves. DOTA's gameplay boils down to the squad-based slaying of monsters and structures. You and your allies do battle with an opposing squad of heroes in a map with three different paths linking you and your opponents' bases. Towers lining each path protect the bases from constantly-spawning squads of automated enemies (called "creeps"). Whenever you kill one of these enemies you gain experience and eventually level up, strengthening your character and unlocking new abilities. Each base also has vendors where you can buy items and equipment to further strengthen and customize your character. The idea is that you keep your opponents and their roaming mobs out of your base, while doing your very best to lay siege to theirs. Each hero has its own strengths and weaknesses, and squad composition is often just as important as execution. It's fast, competitive and extremely addictive, and Blizzard DOTA, which is the first version of this game type to have Blizzard's official support, is certain to be no different.

We wish we had more time with the mod, but what we played struck us as the strongest mod of the four. There were twelve heroes in the version we tried, including some more obscure characters (a 'level 80 elite Tauren chieftain', referencing a metal band formed by Blizzard employees, for example). Unfortunately, according to Blizzard, it's also the furthest away from release. We hope it hits well before StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, which the developer estimates won't be ready anytime before 2012, which is when the world is supposed to end. Coincidence? We'll see...

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