I did this one a while ago... here if you're interested. I finished the campaign today, and now I'll go ahead and present my spoiler-free review of the whole thing, even though the thing's been out for almost a year already.
(In part I'm only doing this because Yahtzee didn't; likewise, now that sfdebris is doing critiques of Doctor Who episodes, I'm feeling generally inferior and haven't been posting my reviews as a result. That's why, honest. Laziness has nothing to do with it.)
Okay, so Brood War left off with the Protoss more or less bitch-slapped, the Terrans reeling, and the Zerg more or less utterly triumphant. Then the Queen of Blades sits on her ass for four years doing apparently ####-all.
Then Jim Raynor's old buddy Tychus Findlay gets busted from prison,* and suddenly everyone's off on a quest to kick ass, repeat the most famous set-piece battles from the first game, and take names.
*Okay, yeah, here's my first problem with the game: the opening cinematic reveals that Mengsk freed Tychus for a reason. So having Tychus claimed he escaped, and then claiming he escaped with the help of the Mobius Foundation kind of made me distrust him. Because I have an IQ that's at least slightly higher than that of a retarded kindergartner. And then he goes on and on about "old times" and reveals that Raynor was an outlaw before he became the Marshal on Mar Sara. Um whut... (also, why is Raynor back on Mar Sara? Remember that really famous battle in level 3 of the first game where you had to evacuate? That battle that gets repeated here? ...oh.)
See, I liked the plot of the first game. It seems like one epic fall from grace for Raynor: he starts out as the Marshal on some backwater planet (as much grace as anyone in this verse gets), falls in with some terrorists because they're the only ones fighting the Zerg, falls for a hot, hot girl, loses the hot, hot girl to the monsters, becomes disillusioned with the terrorists, but since the terrorists take over the sector, now he's stuck on the run.
All that's in Chapter 1 on StarCraft. In the rest of the original game and the expansion (Chapters 2-6), Raynor gets to... um, make friends with the Protoss and whine about betrayal. Meanwhile, Kerrigan goes from pawn of the Overlord to the Queen Bitch of the Universe (nobody remembers that that line's originally from The Abyss, do they?), and the Protoss, um, do stuff. Never really liked them, other than Fenix (dammit, Blizzard...)
So, StarCraft II. After 4 years of doing pretty much nothing, Raynor's suddenly thrown into overdrive, gallivanting across the sector killing Zerg, undermining Mengsk and finding artifacts. His story's interesting enough and the characters are largely well done. I complained about the gameplay before, but what's nice about the campaign is that pretty much every old unit there comes back. Of course, did I build a single Goliath during the final mission? Um, no.
(Geez! My original point got the hell away from me. My point was this: at no point in the first game (as far as I remember) did anyone suggest Raynor had been an outlaw before the events on Mar Sara. This is a far more annoying retcon than the relocation of New Gettysburg from a space platform to the surface of Tarsonis.)
Skipping ahead to the final mission, let me just rant about the game's autosave feature. I only had to use it once, so I don't really know whether this was a regular problem or not, but the game autosaved on my right after I repelled an utterly devastating Zerg attack with Kerrigan at the helm. I took terrible, terrible damage. Before I could rebuild, another push came through and killed all my dudes. The game then reloaded and stuck me right back in the same spot. Gee, thanks.
Anyway, campaign's over, very nice, fairly polished, I'm somewhat perplexed about Blizzard's decision to render the majority of the cutscenes using the in-game graphics, but to do a couple (opening, closing, Fall of Tarsonis flashback - which was awesome, by the way, I'm so glad they included it in a game that was so very much about Raynor and the demons of his past) with their own special graphics. It's like shooting a film partly in 35 mm and partly in hi-def, and now I've just compared StarCraft II to The Room. (Though to be fair, I've also just compared StarCraft II to Collateral.) It's like shooting a television episode partly on film and partly on video (oh, hello, Doctor Who, Monty Python). It's weird and jarring and screams of cut corners. Most of the in-game cinematics aren't really all that important anyway; I'd keep the one where the Hyperion escapes from Mar Sara, the one where Raynor encounters Valerian, and the one where Raynor beats up Tychus,** but the others aren't really that necessary.
**And really, I'd just keep that one because of "Sweet Home Alabama" and the music so blatantly pinched from Firefly at the end.
Let's see, other minor complaints: Tosh randomly disappears when you get to the last set of missions. His random, cryptic mutterings were fun to listen to. Once the campaign's over, you can't go back and spend any money you've got left (though why should you have any left?). There are so many awesome things in there that should have been included in multiplayer, like the diamondback and the automated vespene refinery (make that a high-level research thingy, please!)
Gameplay-wise, the thing that bugged the hell out of me the most was some random change made to the attack-move command. In the old game, you could select a group of units, press A, and then click a spot on the map. Your dudes would head to that spot and blast anything that got in their way, while you went about your business doing other stuff. Now in the new game, sometimes that works just fine. Sometimes, however, the attack command stays on for some reason, and so your massive killing squadron ends up shooting at the next unit you select.
Why the hell do I need an attack-move command anyway? The Ghosts now have a hold-fire command; why can't everyone else? The only case I can think of where I wouldn't want my dudes to kill things while they move around the map would be if they were in retreat. If I had my way, you'd left-click to select a unit, and you'd right-click another unit to have the first unit kill the second (this happens already). Or you'd right-click a spot on the map to send the unit on the warpath (this does not). If you want your dudes to attack a specific unit and ignore the others, right-click that unit. If you want your dudes not to fire as they go, that should be a special command, not the default. And if it's not going to be the default, please for the love of God do it right.
So yeah, friendly fire is my biggest complaint about this game. I've accidentally wrecked very expensive units this way - I had a group of Banshees attack-move somewhere, clicked on a Thor, and watched my Banshees blow it sky-high.
My second biggest complaint is that once you've done the campaign there's very little to do. Multiplayer? That's not really my thing, honestly. I loved the original game's scenario editor; I made a bunch of single-player scenarios that were, in my own humble opinion, rather fun to play through. The sequel's scenario editor blows chunks.
Really the smoking gun here is the fact that the Diamondback was originally intended to be in the multiplayer, but was then cut from that and put in the campaign. As nicely-made as the campaign is, it seems like it's just window-decoration for the multiplayer. And even in the age of the internet, that's still bass-ackwards for a PC game.
Final note: am I wrong in being strangely attracted to Infested Kerrigan? I mean, dyamn.
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