Enjoy a review of the Shokz Starcraft 2 Mastery Guide and comparison with other available guides.
So, here it goes. After searching around for a good and solid guide for Starcraft 2 I came across a couple of possible options. One of them was the Shokz Mastery Guide. I can say I was most convinced that this would be the one guide with the most potential. Everything was structured nice and clean and I could only hope the quality of the guide was the same as the home page made it appear. I decided I had to check it out and see if these guides were really worth the buy. I was skeptical about it and had my doubts about whether it would prove to be of extra value or not. But this guide will indeed give you great insight on how to master the Terran, Protoss, and Zerg and on learning the top strategies and play styles of all three races to earn your way to #1 rank Diamond.
Registration
The registration / purchase process was quick and simple (using PayPal) and within minutes I had access to the PDF guide and the members area. I started reading the PDF and found out it contained some very handy tips. It is really aimed at beginners and puts some basics to word. However it doesn't go any further than some mere basics information, but that's what the members area is for.
Beginner part
The members area is the part of the site that contains all the goodies. It starts with a 6 part beginner guide that really lays the fundamentals and shows you the importance of a lot of factors that will prove to be very important in your game. It really goes into details on how and also why to do certain things.
It is layed out like this:
Chapter 1: Basic Game Concepts
- Units and Buildings
- Resources
Chapter 2: Fundamentals
- Spend your resources
- Economy
- Army
- Technology
- Obtain and Control information
Chapter 3: Micromanagement
- Positioning
- Kiting and Reverse Kiting
- Spell Casting
Chapter 4 Specifics
- Build Order
- Timings
- Polish
Chapter 5: Meta Game
- Knowing your enemy
Chapter 6: Knowing yourself
- Self Improvement
- Playing to win
I found this beginner guide very helpful and a must read if you want to lay a solid foundation to build upon. It's about 13 A4 pages filled with useful info. If you are a more experienced player you will be familiar with most of it and perhaps just pick up a few usefully things.
Hot Keys
Next to the beginner guide, there is the "Hot Key & APM Guides" sections which explains the importance of hotkeys, which ones are useful and how to use them to their full potential. The other parts of the guide already cover a bit on APM but there will be coming a more extensive APM guide soon. (At the time of writing, the APM part says coming soon).
Up to date
This is also a great thing about the Shokz guide, that it is constantly being updated. I have had the guide for 2 weeks now and during these 2 weeks many updates have already taken place. When I purchased the guide only part one of the campaign was present. At this time it covers the 1st 3 parts. During this time the guide was also updated with an "Achievements Guide", and a couple of extra Zerg strategies.
Race Guides and Strategies
This brings us to the parts of the guide which contain the real strategies and tips on how to play with each race, explaining the units, what the units are good for, how to counter them efficiently from each of the race's perspectives and a lot of strategies for Terran, Zerg and Protoss that are certainly must reads if you want to succeed at becoming a good and solid Starcraft 2 player. To give you a better idea of it, next to the "Unit guides" with info about the units, what they are weak against, strong against, very strong against, their upgrades, there are a lot of "Terran, Zerg and Protoss guides", on how to effectively play with the race in general, and there are a lot of "Terran, Zerg and Protoss Strategy guides", on really specific strategies and their build orders you can use with each race winch you will find of very good use.
Training Tools
Some other very handy tools offered inside the members area are the Unit Tester Map, Multitasking Trainer Map, Build Order Tester Map to really train yourself into the habit of using a good workflow in your multi-player games.
Map Editor
For those of you that are interested in getting creative, building your own maps and units, there is also a guide which will get you started on using the Starcraft 2 editor.
Conclusion and own experience
All in all this guide contains tons of useful info that will no doubt give you value for your money and will help you on how to become a Starcraft 2 pro. Can you get all the information in the guide for free? Yes, if you plan to do a lot searching. If you search the internet you will find sites that offer free information, the blizzard site being one of them, and forums being the other. However you will not have the convenience to have everything bundled in one location that is constantly being updated and you will have to search much harder to gain all the reliable info. The owner of the Shokz guide has set his mind to offering a source of great value for his users and packs all you need to know in his members area.
So I would certainly recommend this guide. Personally I don't have time to play a lot, which is important as well as practice makes perfect, but I stick to the occasional game, played a couple of single player vb AI matches, skipped the practice mode and played the 5 placement matches and got placed in the gold league, with having read just the beginner part guide and really putting the information to practice. Continuing reading this guide is showing to prove its value as I am improving with each game and having my first 6 wins in the gold league, climbing my way up to platinum.
Customer Service
Last but not least, customer service. I contacted the owner with a couple of questions, one being the "money back" question. John from Shokz Guide replied to me within a day and had no problem with giving a refund. I must say, in the contrary to all, yes all the other guides I purchased.
Guide Comparison
I wanna end this review with a quick comparison to the other guides I tried, being the "starcraft2secrets" and "star2pros" guide available. These guides really don't come close to the quality and information provided by the Shokz guide. The info in them is ok, they certainly contain some useful info as well but no new things that the Shokz guide does not provide. Star2pros tends to go into a little bit more detail when it comes to the specific strategies but all round did not give me any more value. I don't find it useful to review these guides as the Shokz guide covers the most. Other than that, I contacted both of these owners as well for a question and a refund. I even send a second email and now, almost 2 weeks later I still haven't received a single reply. They really do not live up to what they promise on their sales page as far as my experience with them goes. The Shokz guide did live up to its promises and therefore I think this quick comparison is all you need to know about the other guides.
Source: Shokz Mastery Guide Review
The author is a casual Starcraft 2 player with a solid experience in RTS games.
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