| Title | Does Starcraft II really need Heart of the Swarm? |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Game reviews |
| When | March 14, 2013 |
Heart of the Swarm consists of seven units. Well, six and a half, since one of the units is the nascent form of an already existing unit. Actually, maybe six and a quarter since one of the units is an alternate form for another already existing unit..
Read the full articleI would argue that Blizzard have been incredibly sparing with their additions to the multiplayer. Ultimately, there are few saleable bullet points.
"what does it say about me that I consider the skirmish and multiplayer the “actual game”, but I’m not dedicated enough to make any sort of meaningful judgment about how the new units affect balance"
This kind of undermines your review. It's not that we expect expertise - game reviewers are infuriatingly unskilled at games, but that doesn't mean they can't have a point, but when it comes to Starcraft, we need more than the word of an openly admitted dilettante, especially if one is going to purport to tell people what the game is "really" about.
Yeah if you don't dig the campaign then then there is not much to justify the $40. I think I will get 20 to 30 hours out of it though. Blizzard kinda has you. If you want to play SC2 online with people everyone is gonna have this pack. It is just like Call of Duty. You don't want to be the one without the maps.
"For all their incomparable game design smarts, Blizzard remains one of the worst storytellers in the business, partly for how hard they try and mostly for how spectacularly they fail."
Truer words were never spoken. One of these days, I'd love for Blizzard to take one of their enormous budgets and get a game's story right. It would be glorious.
As for Heart of the Swarm, I almost feel obligated to play it. For the spectacle. For the polish. And for the zeitgeist.
I followed competitive SC2 for a couple years after launch, for the most part enjoying it, but towards the end, feeling that there were issues with the races that I wanted to see resolved. So I was really looking forward to the new units in HotS, but from what I saw during the beta, nothing looks to be as metagame shifting/correcting as the units from BW were. They seem more tacked on, probably because most of the new units seem solely designed to hard counter the problem units each race was facing, which is pretty dull. I was hoping for something more creative.
The fact that the campaign is so divorced from the skirmish/multiplayer is one of its biggest strengths. Too many RTS developers put together a campaign as a sort of half-assed introduction to a multiplayer mode many people will never bother to play. But it will never serve that purpose because facing purposely neutered AI with specific scripted maneuvers and a severely limited toolbox does very little to acclimate you to playing a full skirmish. SCII wisely relegates attempts at training you for multiplayer to a series of tutorial missions, challenge modes that train specific multiplayer-relevant skills, and an AI skirmish ladder.
Instead, it gifts people like me* with a rich, varied toybox of scenarios and units that don't have to maintain that knife-edge asymmetric balance because nobody's on the other end to complain about things being overpowered. Wings of Liberty was one of the best RTS campaigns I've ever played, with only the similarly liberated Dawn of War II campaign(s) competing very strongly and that series skewed off hard into a more ARPG mode. Wings of Liberty felt like the more traditional RTS let out into the sun to shine.
I have not gotten very far into Heart of the Swarm's campaign, but it seems like a solid followup so far, and it's certainly what I will spend the majority of my time with the game playing.
That said, I would really appreciate a better story (I swear Starcraft's was much better. What the heck happened?).
*I can't abide skirmish mode. I can appreciate that it's undoubtedly full of strategic and tactical depth. But like chess, it's a small handful of interactions repeated over and over from game to game in slightly different variations, and it's much more about developing skills over the long haul (skills which aren't really useful in any sort of practical sense unless you're good enough to compete professionally...and then only because people for some reason are willing to pay people to play games, something which bewilders me in the contexts of both regular and e-sports.). It's almost completely orthogonal to how I enjoy games. I dabble, I prioritize narrative, and I need regular new ways to play or new toys to play with.
This is by far the most ill-informed review I've ever read. Adding seven units to StarCraft 2 multiplayer is like adding 7 pieces to chess. This many units easily makes a world of difference. That's why the campaign has nearly 3 times as many new units for zerg, and they simply don't include those kinds of choices in multiplayer because it wouldn't be remotely close to balanced. (3 variations of each unit) Add much more to multiplayer (especially with another expansion down the road) and the player gets overwhelmed. I can agree that the story isn't the best, but for the love, you're reviewing a game, not a movie which means poor storytelling for all but an RPG should be worth such a significant low score.
Call me a fanboy, but honestly, I don't care if you rate the game 2/5 stars, just have significant legitimate reasons for it... liiike "This game has bad gameplay." or "This game isn't fun." Even if a story isn't satisfactory for you, it shouldn't merit such a low score. The feeling I get with a review like this is that you're just trying to get people to come check out the website, or it's simply you're reading the forums and agreeing with other ill-informed individuals who don't know how to professionally critique a game.
While the campaign's story is so-so... the missions are well designed and a ton of fun.
But what you are really missing here about the "six and a quarter" new units in multiplayer (as well as the massive amounts of changes to existing units) is not just how they effect balance, or how many of them there are... but that they have created entirely new sets of playstyles and strategies that literally did not even exist before.
Overall though, I would review this review as one of the worst reviews I have ever read. And I normally don't have a problem with reviewers giving low scores to games that I like if they have valid points... which none of yours are.
Perhaps it is simply because of how literate I am with the game and what my knowledge of it is... but so far, every other professional review has at least ACTED like they knew what they were talking about, instead of in your case, where you make it painfully obvious.
I read a lot of the stuff about the new units as if maybe somebody who was reviewing a shooter game said "there are some new guns that do different stuff, but I'm not good enough at actually shooting them to be able to tell how they affect gameplay."
If you don't know how it is affecting gameplay... how are you even capable of reviewing it?
Anyways, I have as much of a right to review your review as you do to review games, so I give this review a 0/5.
You of course, are free to review my review of your review.
PS: I'm only gold level on the ladder... but still understand enough to smell out this mess.
I'm not going to knock you real hard for disliking the game, Tom, but I really disagree with you on this one. As much as I loved the original SC/BW, I think SC2 is the better set of games.
Granted, the writing in the new games is fairly abysmal, and the story between missions is a ridiculous shlockfest, but the level design in the missions themselves, is some of the most inventive I've seen in an rts. As far as i'm concerned, the story and cut-scenes are just fun bits of eye candy that try to justify the inventive mission objectives that make the campaign interesting. I thought stuff like the WoL mission where you alternate between attacking during the day and defending through the night were really clever mission ideas that made the SC2 campaign more enjoyable than the older games' campaigns even if they fall-flat narratively. So far, the new campaign has just been more of that... which is pretty much what I wanted out of the new expansion.
As for multiplayer/skirmish? I really can't say how they are going to impact play yet, but as a protoss player, I like the additions we got. I certainly wouldn't say I'm a good SC2 player, but at least with this game the matchmaking seems good enough that I end up at about .500 at the end of a season. HotS feels like it provides more options than WoL. If you do play toss, for example, air is much more viable, and you don't really need to rely on colossus so much, which I think I like. We'll just have to see what happens down the line.
TLDR: Overall, I've gotten a lot of enjoyment from the new expansion so far, and for as much crap as Blizzard (deservedly) receives I think they've done a bang-up job on HotS and SC2, in general.
Hi first time here and thankfully it will be my last. Worst review for anything I have ever read.
Tom, you just single-handedly took Heart of the Swarm's Metascore below 80. Only for a few hours, but still: awesome. I remember how Dustin Bowder confronted you at an industry event because you gave the base game a "like it" instead of "love it" review. Next time, he's bringing core lore/story guy Chris Metzen with him.
I think I'm starting to get the appeal of the campaign — it's for honing micro and solving some pretty tough strategy puzzles (on hard) while gorging on spectacle, cheese, zany upgrades, and crazy high production values, if you care about that sort of thing. But I agree that some of the new units are weak. I've felt that way since I tried them in the beta. The Protoss crescent overlaps a bit with the mothership, which should have been removed, but it serves largely the same purpose, and in largely the same way, as the Zerg Brood Lord. So much for completely different factions. It's hard to get excited about a terran mine, or a walking version of the base game's Hellion unit that, inexplicably, can be healed by Medivacs. But only when it's transformed into a Hellbat. But who knows, maybe they do wonders for the gameplay. I actually like the new Zerg tongue snatcher and siege spawner units, but they're probably too fiddly for my current skill level, too. And the Protoss Oracle I just plain like. I order it to hover over an opponent's saturated mineral line from the mini-map and shift click to activate its pulsar cannon when it arrives. You clearly haven't experienced the effect of this from either perspective yet, probably because it's high risk and easy to stop/prevent. In spite of my affinity for Heart of the Swarm — one of the few games I like that's played by real life friends, so I'm with it for the long haul — I'm struck by how Blizzard didn't deliver a better set of additions to the game after almost 3 years since Wings of Liberty's release.
What you might be missing is how the new units and abilities opened up strategies with units that were previously little used. As a diamond zerg player I am shocked at how much more useful hydras are. Not only that, but now an army composed of 3 different units is a viable choice for me at midgame (ling/roach/hydra).
This expansion will have a huge impact on the multiplayer meta game. It will be really fun to watch it shift as new strategies are discovered, tested, and perfected.
I frickin' love the Oracle so far!! I think it's great at giving slower players (like me) an easier way to harass. I don't quite get the mothership core yet but I had one weird loss where a player built a nexus in front of my base early and used its canon to take out all my units. It sucks to lose, but it was kinda neat to lose in such a bizarre way, and I guess that's why I like SC2 MP in a nutshell. :)
Wow, did Chris Metzen rape your parents or something?
For all of the storyline's faults this game remains a strong triple A title. Giving it a score of 40 makes you look like the comic book guy from the simpsons.
It's one thing to be critical - say, giving the game a mere 70, but a 40 just destroys any credibility you have.
Came here just to add the site to my blocked list. What a whoreish way to try to get views for your shitty site. Go blow a horse for money faggot cause you suck at your job.
A minor point I just couldn't let go uncorrected.
The Tempest and the Broodlord are very different, in fact, the Tempest is the counter to the Broodlord. It fires extremely slowly and does +50 damage (from an original 30) vs 'Massive' Units like Broodlords. Without Tempests there is no way to engage that Zerg army now that Vortex has been removed from the game.
It's true. Blizzard was never a good storyteller.
To me the downfall of the campaign was that planet of the primal zergs. Anyone notice how ridiculously they resemble the Naga from Warcraft 3?
Attention Blizzard/Starcraft fanboys: When you all dogpile into a review's comment section, only to say shit like "eat a bag of dicks, person who disagrees with me" or "my favorite game is awesome because it's my favorite", you do more to persuade me that Starcraft II is terrible than Tom Chick's review ever could.
Fair warning.
Why does the metacritics count reviews of this site? They should embrace review sites that have adequate perspective.