It’s a risky move channeling everything through battle.net and the web, but I think it’s worth the risk in this case having everything integrated. I don’t think critics understand that if Blizzard went with the standard approach you’d lose a lot of the functionality and features that makes this game great.

That does stink about losing connectivity. There should be some sort of warning and I’m confident it will be patched soon.

People who want to complain will, but I’ve yet to hear a single legitimate argument or see a any reason myself not to like this game. Unless of course the argument of the consequences of spending an abnormal amount of time addicted to a computer game, but that’s another issue altogether.

I’ve played SC off and on since it was released and I for one am beyond impressed with its sequel and look forward to another 10-15 years with the sc2 trilogy.

If you add your friends you can organise matches directly with them over battlenet instead of LAN, I understand that’s still online but it’s not like you can’t play with them.

Finally this game has almost 30 missions in 1 campaign. The original had around 10 missions per campaign and 3 campaigns, so there’s no loss in missions. I’d expect zerg and protoss campaigns to be slightly cheaper as core benefits will already be in the main SC2 game.

overall it’s got a great SP game and I expect to be beaten without mercy online, but there’s replays to learn from matches, a ranking system to matchmake, etc. If you like RTS or blizzard games this is a sure deal since it’ll take up much more of your time than any other $60 of PC games would.