StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void (2015)

Playtime: 16 hours (Protoss + Epilogue campaign completed)

Intro

Starcraft 2 is a real time strategy game divided in a Terran, Zerg and Protoss campaign. Legacy of the Void is the latter and final part.

The Good

• Support abilities from the ship make the game much more interesting.
• You can freely switch (all) upgrades between missions.
• For the most part the game is really solid, even the escort missions are fine.
• Decent mix of other gameplay elements (e.g. deadly fog, allies).
• Super-smooth gameplay.

The Bad

• The menu still only opens when pressing F10. Seriously guys, it's been Escape for decades now.
• The final two missions are weirdly hard, especially compared to the easy mission right before them.
• The story and dialogue are almost entirely awful.
• Some really ugly designs, especially Fenix.
• The final mission should've been Terran or Protoss, not Zerg. It just feels "wrong".

Conclusion

LotV fixes the "permanent upgrade" problem of Wings of Liberty and isn't as overly easy as Heart of the Swarm. It may actually be the best campaign of the three, though i remember really liking the Terran one too. In any case, this is about as good an RTS as you can get. I wish there were more missions, that's how good it is.

StarCraft 2 (SC2) is the first RTS I've ever played. Of my 100 hours in SC2 about 15 hours were spent playing the Wings of Liberty Campaign, 5 in Co-Op, and the remaining 80 were in competitive multiplayer.

Competetive Multiplayer

To me, this was the core of SC2. I tried all of the races: the Terrans (Scrappy Humans, Marines and Tanks), the Zerg (Swarm of Alien Bugs), and the Protoss (High Tech Aliens). I ended up sticking with the Zerg, I liked how they ended up playing like in the game, smash your opponent with a swarm of bugs.

Before playing SC2 I was really into a board game called Go (basically Chinese Chess). Before I burnt out on Go, I spent many hours reading books, going over replays, and playing games to improve. It was tons of fun while it lasted. SC2 filled that competitive void for me. I started in Bronze, and slowly climbed up 4 ranks to Diamond 3(top 20% of the player base). Since SC2 multiplayer is 1v1, there is nobody to blame except for yourself when you lose. This turns many off the game, but too me it was a refreshing change from Overwatch (team shooter). I learned tons of build orders and got my APM up.

The reason why I stopped playing SC2 was that it turned out to be less tactical than I thought it was. Once I got to Diamond the game turned into trying to figure out what my opponent's build order was, and then using the pre-defined build that countered it. At that level I found I could no longer be creative and freestyle in matches if I wanted to win. It became less like a game and more like following a set of instructions.

That being said, for a solid 60 hours I had fun with Starcraft 2's multiplayer.

Campaign

I made it about 50% through the Wings of Liberty campaign (I replayed a bunch of levels on the hardest difficulty). The story was alright, nothing amazing. I really liked the music though. The levels were fun, made the RTS gameplay a bit more interesting. However, the campaign never really 'grabbed hold of me'.

Co-Op

Not much to say, didn't play co-op a whole bunch. It was fun at first, the different heroes were interesting, but it got stale pretty quickly. Mainly because the levels, even on the highest difficulty, were pretty easy.