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dkirschner's Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm (PC)

[March 18, 2021 12:06:08 PM]

I played Wings of Liberty like 10 years ago, whenever it was released. I grew up on Starcraft, so that was one of the most exciting games I'd ever played. I'm not sure why exactly it took me 10 more years to play the expansions. The motivation wasn't there, I suppose. Anyway, when Starcraft 2 went free-to-play, Heart of the Swarm was a "free gift" (and apparently I have Legacy of the Void too, sweet!), so it's been on my list.

Before playing Heart of the Swarm, I actually went back and replayed 2/3 of Wings of Liberty, assuming I needed a refresher. I forgot Blizzard are kings of tutorials. Once I remembered the story enough and realized that they would probably start players off with the basics in the expansion, I quit replaying Wings of Liberty (fun though it was) and got to the new one. But, wow has a metagame ever built up around Starcraft 2. There seem to be hundreds of challenge modes, weekly events, leagues, and all sorts of shit to keep people into it.

Heart of the Swarm was cool, more nostalgic than anything. I have no desire to "get into" Starcraft 2 as I did a decade ago, and as I had been for my teenage years before that with Starcraft, so this was purely an exercise in beating the game. On normal difficulty, this was a cakewalk. I recall playing Wings of Liberty on Hard and I should have for this too. Ah, well, I'll do it for Legacy of the Void. What's interesting is that as I was breezing through normal, I remembered how fun it was to just screw around with the game, to create AI matches, to try to fill the map with photon cannons or max out units with carriers. I remembered playing against people and setting off nuclear missiles in places they would never find, boxing them in with supply depots and bunkers, landing surgical strikes on their drones.

I suppose what I'm saying is that I didn't get much of that playfulness in this campaign. Every level has some particular rule to it--retreat every 5 minutes so your units don't die of gas, stop what you're doing while lava rises and falls, protect x things, and so on. Rarely, if ever, are you just given a starting area and told to kill the other guys. I appreciate the variety of the levels, but "go kill the other guys" is the core of the game! So you spend the campaign acquiring new units and upgrades but you're always constrained by the level rules and never are told to just "go kill the other guys" with all your fun new toys.

Maybe that's an argument for me playing random AI matches like I used to do. Maybe that's more fun. Maaaaybe...