I'm about half way through the single-player campaign in Starcraft II and I'm already bored out of my skull. This is pretty much exactly like every other real time strategy game that thought, hey, let's tell a story! Real time strategy games are a terrible format for telling stories, because the stories exist almost entirely in the gaps between the gameplay. Starcraft II proves that making the gaps huge and elaborately produced doesn't really help matters.

However, after the jump, there's at least one reason you need to play the single-player campaign.

There are three kinds of single-player missions in real time strategy games. 1) Commando missions, where you get a limited number of dudes who move down a hallway. These are never not awful. 2) Siege missions, where you hunker down and hold out for a time limit while waves of stupid AI throw themselves into your defenses. 3) Build up an army and scour the map. These missions are a bit like cleaning a kitchen counter - oops, you missed a spot - and usually just as fun.

All three are well represented in the Starcraft II campaign. But early on, you'll come to a mission called Outbreak that cleverly combines two of these mission types. It's equal parts siege mission and clean-the-kitchen-counter mission, based on a day/night cycle. And zombies.

Now I know what you're thinking. "Zombies?" Or, if you're like me, "Zombies!" I had to look long and hard at Outbreak to determine whether I loved it just for the zombies. I'm still not sure of the answer, but I'm going to fake it anyway. Also, within the fiction of the Starcraft universe, these zombies are actually "Zerg infested Terrans". I'm pretty sure that's an anagram for "zombie". I need to go look that up on the internet.

But the point is that it uses the zombie concept in the context of a day/night cycle. At night, zombies stream out of buildings and shamble towards your base en masse. You, of course, have a few choke points defended with bunkers and flamethrowers (protip: be sure to post a Medic and SCV for healing and repairs). During the day, the sun burns the zombies away, at which point you need to wipe out as many of their buildings as you can, ideally with fast moving units that shoot fire. Oh, hello there, Hellion introductory mission! As night falls, you skedaddle back to the safety of your base. And I don't want to spoil anything, but it wouldn't be a zombie siege unless something went wrong with the defensive perimeter.

It reminds me a bit of what Crackdown tried to do with the alternating pulses of daytime safety and nighttime zombie peril. It's an effective twist and it makes for one of the most exciting single-player RTS missions I've played in any game. In fact, I'll gladly replay Outbreak on a harder difficulty level, just for fun (i.e. the achievement).

Outbreak even has a nice sense of humor. "I think I saw a movie about this once," says one of the characters as the mission is explained. And when it's all over, one of the achievements you can earn is called 28 Minutes Later. Well played, Blizzard. Well played.

Up next: the plot congeals!
(Click here for the previous Starcraft II game diary.)