The Roaches pile in like a plague of land-borne space locusts and savage the entire Terran complex with devastating efficiency. Resistance is totally futile as the upgraded Roach is impervious to whatever the rapidly decreasing robot army can throw at it.

That's why we're laughing. Not so much at what's happening on screen but at the look on the face of the guy who's taking the Roach hiding. All he can do is watch, open-mouthed, shaking his head as all his painstaking clicking and building is reduced to dust. It's like he's been kicked down some particularly high steps.

If only that was the recurring story of our 16 hour play test of multiplayer StarCraft II, held in a darkened room in Blizzard's offices. Because for the remaining 15 hours 40 minutes it was us who got consistently reamed.

We blame it on our age. Before we started playing we learned that in Korea, where StarCraft is a national sport, players are considered over the hill once they reach the age of 24. Many of our opponents were young StarCraft experts, members of community websites and forums brought in to discuss the minutiae of the new game with the development team - all under 24. At 29 going on 30 we didn't stand a chance. That's our excuse anyway.

Some context: prior to getting hands-on time with StarCraft II, the idea of spending 16 hours playing an RTS (any RTS in fact) filled us with fear. Not only were we ill-at-ease with the terminology used - never mind Protoss, Zerg and Terran, what about Toxic Creep, the Nydus Canal mechanic and Swarm Infestation? - but the RTS genre itself, to us, is something of a dark art, a mysterious past-time undertaken by a fanatical breed of anorak gamers. Initial thoughts? This wouldn’t be fun: it was going to be a baffling ordeal.

But after we'd applied our minimal knowledge of the mechanics of original StarCraft to this latest version it became clear to us why Blizzard is the multi-million dollar company it is. Their designers know exactly what hooks you in to a game, makes you want to keep playing and then play some more until your legs go numb and dehydration sets in. Whether it's World Of Warcraft or StarCraft, these are series that go beyond being transient 'games', developing into entire global communities that ignore passing trends of graphics, fashionable genre clones and console arms races.

The reason we're here in Blizzard's HQ is to see the official unveiling of the Zerg. If you're a) a StarCraft fan, or b) consume game news daily, you probably knew about this before we did - a prior unveiling in Korea and time-zones meant the info and new trailer had already hit the web before we even got there. But what the Internet already had couldn't compare with the opportunity to sit down with the game for two days straight.

In brief the Zerg make up the third race of warring factions in the StarCraft game world. Broadly speaking they are the animalistic, insectoidal organic beings of the game, opposed to the robotic, mech/human getup of the Terran and the more traditional Star Trek alien wares of the Protoss. These three groups hate each other and you get to choose who to side with and lead into battle. Even more briefly, StarCraft's gameplay is thus: collect resources, build things and then fight - really frigging fast. (For more info on previous StarCraft II announcements click here.)

The Zerg are fundamentally different to other races in the way you approach building units, structures and foot soldiers. The foundation of their race is a Hatchery, a kind of termite’s nest that spawns a writhing larva every thirty seconds. These larvas are the basis of everything in the Zerg hierarchy. As well as morphing them into Zerg units, they can mutate themselves into the various structures you need to grow your army. One path you could take, for example, is to create an army of Roaches.

Here's how it would work:

1. Start collecting minerals and vespene gas. These are the two essential resources and the 'currency' of StarCraft II.

2. As soon as you have enough resources, send one of your Drones (the Zerg worker unit) to morph into a Spawning Pool. This is a necessary step to create a Roach Den which is where your Roach army will hatch from.

3. Create your Roach Den.

4. Now, each time your Hatchery spits out new larvae, you can choose to grow it into a Roach.

5. As you continue to collect minerals clicking on the Roach Den will offer you the chance to upgrade the level of your Roaches making them change visually and increasing their attack power and their ability to absorb damage.

6. Roaches kick ass.

The strategic advantage of the Zerg is the immediacy that their style of evolution brings. Take Terran for example. In order to create their base units, the Marines, you need to put time and resources into creating a Barracks and then wait for the foot soldiers to emerge one by one. However the Zerg hatchery is also the 'barracks', removing that additional ‘build’ step from the process.

A particularly effective tactic this allows for is to first create a Spawning Pool and then begin building Zerglings, a slightly less powerful version of the Roach. The speed with which these can be amassed is often enough to totally overwhelm any opposition playing as Protoss and Terran, who will probably still be fiddling around with more or less defenceless Drones.

And this is just what we meant when we described the seemingly impenetrable RTS scene. If the above leaves you feeling an insufferable urge to hit the back button and read about Super Smash Bros or GTA IV instead, please just take this from it: StarCraft II's trump card is how accessible it makes relatively complex game mechanics. As long as you can grasp the concept of collecting, building, and attacking (all achieved with simple 'menu' driven mouse clicks) the subtleties and strategy just come naturally with extended play.

In our experience this occurred after seeing our opponents attack with new units we'd yet to discover which prompted us to search through the build options to see what we needed to invest in to get the same one. Usually this was accompanied by total annihilation of our own base - a totally demoralising experience, as witnessed by our opponent earlier on - but it's all part of the learning process. And the amazing thing is, rather than prompting you to hit the off button, it just makes you want to go back and try a slightly different approach. See if you can make it work this time.

So after witnessing our ground defences being butchered by Zerg air units known as Swarm Guardians, we saw their destructive potential and worked out the fastest route to build some of our own: you need to build a Spire in your base, create some Mutalisks and then morph them to Swarm Guardians.

Now, no-one *tells* you that, but all the information on how to do it is provided in the info panels that pop up out of the user interface at the bottom of the screen. Blizzard also promised that it will be including mulitiplayer tutorials for those that need babying and may include post-defeat feedback, to explain in detail why you sucked so much.

Despite two days of play we can't do justice to many of the new Zerg units created for StarCraft II because we didn't get around to using them. Or in some cases we just felt we hadn't really got to grips with how to use them properly. Take the new Queen unit. She was hyped up in a presentation as the ultimate defensive weapon in the Zerg army.

Having created one (you can only have a single Queen) and expecting great things from her when our base came under attack, she was quickly decimated from the air, leaving us to the now obligatory two minutes of humiliation as we were systematically taken apart, unit by unit.

The one thing we did find useful about a maxed-out Queen was her healing abilities. She can also burrow under the ground and surface at other bases you may have across the map but we never managed to make that work effectively amid the terrifying confusion and lack of judgement that marked the majority of our battle encounters.

Another new unit (all of which you can see here) is the Corruptor. Rather than use firepower to kill an enemy it attacks like a parasite and turns the enemy against itself. Yep, you guessed it; we had this tactic used on us before we even understood how it worked. Then when we tried to create some Corruptors of our own, we got rushed early on and never saw the fruits of our labour.

And that's about the only complaint we can level at StarCraft II. It's too bloody easy to get destroyed before you’ve got started because the young boys have clicked on things faster than you. That's why if you watch the Korean StarCraft maniacs you'll notice they've developed Jedi-like mutant fingers that can click a mouse something like 23 times a second. Apparently they very rarely get much further than building a few basic structures because battles are decided on who can create a better attack force before their opponent.

That's a level we'll never be able to play at, so it's lucky Blizzard is working on a ranking system that will ensure your opponent is of a similar level to you. So we look forward to playing against all the 67-year-old StarCraft II fans. The ones with a single arm.

You might have noticed we left out any mention of the sparkling 3D graphics. It wasn't intentional. We just forgot. But that says something about Blizzard's philosophy. To use one of Blizzard's own maxims - 'it's all about gameplay'. A massive cliché, yes, but they've got the right to say it in earnest. For graphics whores, check out the screens and videos – that’s exactly what it looks like in game. We’ll just add that seeing 45 Roaches, 12 Ultralisks, 16 Swarm Guardians and countless Zerglings moving across a map in formation is a sight to behold.

When Blizzard say they'll be spending much of their time prior to release 'balancing' we reckon they've got a job on if it's to find a happy medium between satisfying the needs of the hardcore and the beginner. Will the team manage it? The chances are good. Look at us, the RTS phobe  - we’re converted already.

Furthermore, there's no release date set, so the team's got as much time as they need to get it right. We're counting on it coming up good because the more noobs they can get to give StarCraft II a go (and they should) the better chance we stand of winning a few bloody games.