3.5/5 ★ – Becix's review of StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm.

Let's start by saying that these will be my impressions and my opinions about the Single Player Campaign. I love SC and SCII multiplayer and they are 5 stars from this point of view, but let's not focus on the multiplayer but on the campaign structure, gameplay and plot. To schematize my thoughts in an easier way I'll list only three things I liked and three things I did not like. THREE THINGS I LIKED + The missions. This time almost every mission has something unique, interesting and appealing. I played them at Brutal difficulty, and really had a lot of fun improving my skills to not die badly each mission. The secondary objectives also are mostly funny to achieve and not boring (there are also boring ones, but way less than in WoL). + The campaign overall structure. This time they did a good thing by making every mission mandatory and having a more linear structure of the campaign. Even if the plot itself is pretty simple, this time I feel that every mission is functional to the final Kerrigan objective: killing Mengsk. We also have a bit of glimpse on the hybrid and Amon, but the main objective was really clear from the beginning, differently from WoL. + The customization of the swarm/army. It was really funny customizing your army through Kerrigan's passive abilities and evolution missions. I didn't really appreciate the thing that you only could give 1 upgrade to your zergs, and that was limiting in some ways (zerglings without both attack speed and speed upgrades are pretty terrible). Hopefully many problems were made up thanks to the creep upgrade that gave me the possibility to spread it easily over every map and have really fast zergs even without specific upgrades, in order to gave them a bit more power overall. I also had fun spreading the creep lmao (If i'll ever return to play multiplayer I'll probably switch to zerg) THREE THINGS I DID NOT LIKE - The characters are a bit plain as ever. The best one is always Jimmy, while Kerrigan is pretty a Mary Sue (when in Brood war was a really cool villain). Also Kerrigan's supporting cast wasn't really interesting, starting from Zagara. Dehaka is funny, but I have a bit of a contrast about primordial zergs themselves. I loved Zeratul as a kid but he's so uselessly cryptic lol. Valerian also is a pretty terrible character, really plain and his only thing is that "he good his father bad and he knows it". Would've been cool if he had some interior conflict about his father being a piece of sh*t, but instead he says "ok kerrigan kill him who cares lol" - The goddamn retconning. This is maybe the worst thing about SCII plot as a whole, but in this campaign was much more present than in WoL and thus even worse. Jim and Sarah's love story is pretty cringe and out of the blue, since they weren't romantically involved in the original SC. But we have a worse thing: Zergs being created by the big evil guy Amon only to kill his god-friends. This again is a big retcon, and worsens the "real origin of the Overmind" that was discovered in WoL. Also Zerus was pretty disappointing to see, even if missions are really cool, especially when during SC1 era it was known that zergs were simply organisms modified from the Overmind starting from existings other organisms SCATTERED in the galaxy, and not from a single mother planet. - The unit selection. In WoL we had a big range of units to select. Here we have a pretty limited amount, and this hurts especially from the air units point of view: we only have mutalisks and brood lord/viper. This hardly limits the air strategies, because mutas sucks to defend brood lords against other air units (since they are good only against a few of them), while corruptors (or devourers) do really good this job making a ton of damage to heavy air units such as carriers (that totally annihilate mutas). Because of this I almost never used mutas or broodlords and focused mainly on land units, highly reducing the number of strategy I could use.