Video Game Product Review – 935 Words

935 word product review for the title Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm (2013). It was written for a defunct, but award nominated, independent blog after the title’s launch in March 2013. It features strong authorial voice as the blog was personality driven. While the voice is strong, the piece overall remains helpful to the average reader.

As an expansion, Heart of the Swarm doesn’t shake up the Starcraft II formula in any major ways. That isn’t to say that Blizzard Entertainment hasn’t taken the chance to polish up a few of the weaker parts of the SCII formula and not others.

Everything you expect from a Blizzard release is here: a spectacular opening full motion video, highly polished presentation, great music, top of the class single and multiplayer game play, and what is technically a story. We’ll come back to that.

The single player follows the same basic formula as the first entry in the SCII saga. You’re given a couple tutorial missions, a way of traveling about the space that the game takes place in and then left to your own devices to move through the campaign as you see fit. In the missions themselves you gain new units to add to your bench, move the plot along, and earn ways to upgrade your units. In Wings of Liberty, most of the upgrades were stat based. In Progression in HoTS comes in two forms. The first of these is the mutations, these work like the upgrades in WoL did and act as basic stat boosts, unlike in WoL though they can be switched at any time. The second and much more exciting, paths for upgrades come in the form of evolutions. To earn an evolution you must first unlock an evolution mission and then complete said mission. At the end you must choose between two different strains that will permanently change the mechanic of how that unit works. Let’s take the bread and butter Zergling as an example: you can either choose to evolve it into the Swarmling which produces three at a time almost instantly or you can choose to evolve it into the Raptor that gains the ability to jump up and down cliffs and pounce on enemies. These evolutions are incredibly fun mechanics that unlock a variety of gameplay styles. This is the one area where HoTS is superior to WoL.

Another path to upgrade is how you’re going to upgrade the main character of the game, Sarah Kerrigan. In the Starcraft lore she is built up to be a being of incredible power. As such, she has a much greater impact in the missions themselves than Jim Raynor did in WoL. Her upgrade tree could be at home in any full-fledged RPG, and some abilities you can equip her with are powerful and can greatly change how you approach the game.

The mission design itself continues to be some of the best in the RTS genre with varied and fun objectives that range from the banal “defend this position for a while” to “mine meat off a carcass to drop into the awaiting maw of an ancient and giant alien”. Blizzard has added a new game plus mode called Master Archives that allow you to replay the missions with all the upgraded and evolved units for those that want to try and tackle the missions on the hardest difficulty. A note on difficulty, if you have any experience with Starcraft or RTS games in general I would suggest you bump the difficulty up to hard on your first play through. The normal difficulty was a cakewalk.

There’s also a story. Let me preface the rest of what I’m going to say with this: I don’t primarily play games for their narratives. I understand that many people do enjoy games for their stories though and as such I feel compelled to talk about it here.

Now that that is out of the way, the story in HoTS is cliched schlock that isn’t any better than the other drivel that the “wordsmiths” at Blizzard have been cramming into their games since Warcraft III. Rife with overused tropes, clichés, awkwardly delivered dialogue, and plot holes it’s hard to get behind the characters’ often confused and disorienting motivations. If you’re looking or expecting any kind of decent story telling, you won’t find it in this expansion; and I wouldn’t expect it from the next. Blizzard has steered the Starcraft narrative from space opera to action movie and it’s worse for it. Consider the story as a means of moving the game along from one exposition dump to the next and nothing more. I may seem to be a bit miffed about the story, but I didn’t let it detract from the fun I was having actually playing the game, and if you enjoy playing games you shouldn’t let it bother you either.

I already wrote about the changes HoTS is making to the multiplayer. Everything I wrote about there is intact in the final release. The multiplayer is fun right now as people who lapsed from playing come back to the game and the new units offer some interesting moments as people adjust to new and wacky tactics and strategies. The changes I highlighted in the multiplayer are for the better for the multiplayer ecosystem.

HoTS is an easy buy if you already have the Starcraft bug. The improvements on top of Blizzard’s usual level of polish and gameplay design make for a great game that is a great value for the money, that is if you don’t let the story get in the way of your enjoyment.

Summary: HoTS makes an already great game even better, just don’t let the story get you down.

Pros: fun missions, excellent upgrade mechanics, improved multiplayer offerings

Cons: Terrible story, spotty performance at times

Score: 9/10

Why a 9?: HoTS is the best in its genre and a must buy if you enjoy RTS games