Starcraft 2 Zerg – Introduction

As I’m writing this, Blizzard is still short of giving us any information on how the Starcraft 2 Zerg race will look. All we can do is take assumptions, based on what we see in the official Starcraft 2 trailer, gameplay movies and from the short breadcrumb trail of hints that Blizzard officials left for us to follow.

The Story

If you played Starcraft Broodwar, the expansion that followed up on the story of the original Starcraft, you might remember that there were a couple of cliffhangers left for a potential sequel and most of them revolved around the Zergs. After defeating the alliance formed against her and the Zerg, Kerrigan became the dominant leader in the Kroprulu sector of the galaxy, also taking the Protoss’ home planet, Aiur, as a bonus snack. Despite having all this power at hand, Kerrigan mysteriously disappears into the void, retreating to Char. It’s expected that the Starcraft 2 Zerg campaign will treat us with a full comeback from Kerrigan and her loyal minions.

Units

Like I said above, the zergs are the only race that didn’t get full coverage on the Starcraft 2 website, although some details on what new and modified units they have were released by the game’s devs. First off, those cute zerglings will receive a new ability: morphing into banelings. Banelings are your basic suicidal mass destruction units. Sort of like the fanatics in Command and Conquer Tiberium Wars.
The Nydus Worm is also a cool new Starcraft 2 zerg unit. It’s basically a huge worm, similar to the sandworm in Dune that can transport units almost instantly from one part of the battlefield to the other. It’s not yet certain whether the Nydus Worm can also attack enemy units, if it’s a building or a unit itself or if it acts as a replacement for the overlords in what regards zerg transportation.
The mutalisk is by no means a new unit, as it was the main air assault component for zerg players in the original Starcraft. If you recall, mutalisks used to spit out a sort of spore when firing that could “bounce” off the initial target and onto a new enemy. It seems that in Starcraft 2, Mutalisks will retain this ability but the bounce rate and distance will be shorter but the shot more powerful. This makes the mutalisks extremely powerful against small clusters of enemies.

Gameplay

From what we know so far, the way zergs play in Starcraft 2 won’t differ much from how they worked in the original game. It will still be the mass production, low armor, overwhelm with numbers type of race and it will be mostly suitable for players that prefer rushing or constantly nagging the enemy with small attack forces. The Nydus Worms give the zerg race a new twist and although there will probably be a way to counter these units, the idea of spitting out 20 zerglings inside the unsuspecting enemy’s base in a matter of seconds is appealing.