Fury tends to be that way about games everyone else enjoys. He responded this way to Prey's demo as well and either could not or would not articulate his opposition in a meaningful way.
Prey was and is a generic FPS which was built around two "fresh" (note: I'm not saying new because the features were hardly new) features that then got overused. Without these two features, it was nothing but as boring and repetitive as Doom 3.
Or he could just be really anal or whatever.
This place tends to trigger that behaviour on frequent basis.
As for SC itself, now that I have played about 1/3rd of the missions, I have to say that the game after all is better than Earth 2160 (which is not a huge accomplishment in itself). I don't know why you particularly care why I don't love this game, but here goes.
- The game is based on "fresh" (again, not new!) feature of map expansion during game. Great, but again this is used in every single mission multiple times. What is it with fresh features that need to be overused?
- Because there are quite few missions and the few are expanded multiple times during mission, the mission begin to feel tiresome and repetitive. You could say it is like FreeSpace's scenarios where you need to protect a cap ship against multiple waves of bombers and fighters.
- Most mobile units are nothing but cannonfodder, often the most officient and quickest way to finish a mission is to send your commander over, except cybran commander which sucks at offensive. Aeon commander on the other hand is so good at offensive that it feels overpowered.
- in SC we finally have static defenses being as strong as they are supposed to be. The downside is that it makes most mobile units often nothing more than cannonfodder unless you send over s awarm of different units, or a few experimental units, or a commander. The turning point of a game seems to be when you get access to T3 unts and buildings, including static artilleries. Which brings me to another issue, artilleries like other units have a priority list of targets, the commander being at the top of the list. This means that if commander is in the range of the artillery, the artillery can finish the game for you without you even needing to step on enemy base. Things get both funny and sad if you get UEF's Mavors built, these things have the range of a whole map, have pinpoint accuracy and fire shells rather rapidly, if one gets built you better say goodbye to your commander.
Anyway, SC is pretty generic albeit decent RTS which overuses its fresh features along with gameplay that aims to drag playtime to as long as possible. Or at the least that's the impression SC leaves to me. That and there are not that much differences between the three factions. The only major differences are in end-game units and buildings, the rest are statistical differences between similar units of the three factions. I'd say that Starcraft had more differences between the dfferent factions' gameplay.
SC does not suck but it isn't all that impressive either, not like the messiah of RTS game like it was touted to be. But then again, hype is hype.
