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.

This game has such weird balancing. Sometimes misions are easy, a couple of times weirdly difficult. The epilogue campaign is really bad. It starts with a Protoss missions that is trivial. It is followed up by a Terran and a Zerg mission which are actually hard even on Normal. And not only do you have to play with a race other than the one you just learned how to use during the campaign, you also don't get to pick upgrades or get support from the abilities you used as the Protoss.

The Terran mission is extra bad because you get assaulted from 4 sides and your Protoss ally will not say a fucking thing while being obliterated. Even on Casual. Bizarre.

Finally got around to playing this. Between SC2 and Diablo 3 it's really noticable just how awful Blizzard's writing is, and how ugly some of their designs have become. Look at this abomination:

It actually looks worse in the (obnoxious cutscenes). Warhammer also seems to have moved into the direction of giant bloated oversized armour and weapons. Did WoW popularise this or something? Does it appeal to kids? I just don't get it.

The writing in LotV is almost all bombastic militaristic nonsense too. The only upside is that they pronounce "Amon" as "ey-mon", so it constantly comes across as a bunch of rastafaris greeting each other.

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.

Es, simplemente, el mejor RTS que yo haya jugado nunca:

Tiene contenido para abrumar: 28 misiones + 3 del prólogo + 3 del epílogo.

El contenido que tiene es de una calidad insospechada, de un diseño pulcrísimo y con una curva de dificultad ajustada al extremo.

Tiene un mod para actualizar el Starcraft 1 y jugarlo con el motor del 2: Más contenido de calidad.

Se acopla perfectamente con WoL y con HotS, que están insultántemente baratos.

Playing Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void and I couldn't be more disinterested in the plot and characters. It's the same tired plot of evil aliens are coming to destroy the galaxy and good guys have to seek the deus ex machina to save the day. How many times has Starcraft done this? Oh right, every time.

I loved the Wings of Liberty; Mengsk was a great villian and made up for their tired plot line. Heart of the Swarm was okay with Kerrigan proving to be a somewhat interesting revenge seeking hero. However Legacy of the Void is very dull with no interesting characters or motivations. Just the same over the top "We must do this for the sake of the galaxy" over dramatic dialog at every scene.

The gameplay itself is very cool and adds nice new innovations to the formula. I will play it through but probably skip most cutscenes.