Does Starcraft II really need Heart of the Swarm?

I have never read so much shit in a text

Zen pinball gets 10/10 while this gets 4/10, what kind of a joke reviewer are you?

the design on this website is worse than a 10 year old's drawing he/she made with their own poop.

No he didn't. I think his summary makes a lot of sense. The acting and dialog is horrible. The pacing is horrible. The flow between missions is horrible and nonsensicle. The plot is worse than Wings of Liberty for sure, not that WoL was amazing. I think he basically nailed it in a very succinct manner. It's just bad.

Carlos, firstly, this is only a review of the Heart of the Swarm expansion. My review of Starcraft II itself was posted on Gameshark.com, which I believe is no longer online.

As for the rating, we use five stars for our scoring system. Three stars means "I like it" and two stars means "I don't like it". Simple as that. So, yes, I do think it's as bad as my two-star score indicates.

And your English is excellent, so no apologies necessary!

Thanks for the reply, Randy. I can completely understand if you don't like my tone, particularly if you really like Heart of the Swarm. :) So, fair point. And thanks for the kind words. It's always nice when people can disagree and still be civil with each other.

This qualifies as a review? I've seen poorly thought out forum posts that were more elaborate and detailed than this tripe. How is this a professional site with reviews like this?

Altogether I would agree except for the fact that your Halo 4 review really killed any trust I had in this website. That was stupid Tom.

This review is horrible, the reviewer is so ignorant, and simple minded. The amount of new units in the game doesn't matter, they could have put in 20 more units to make simple minded people happy, but they would undoubtedly over-lap with other units in the game and make it needlessly bloated or complicated... Quantity doesn't = quality... Also, the game play and cinematic are excellent for an RTS game, which is how this should be viewed/judged... Overall this reviewer sounds like he doesn't enjoy/understand RTS games, and probably shouldn't be reviewing them as a result. It's like serving someone fried chicken, then asking them how they enjoyed it when they're a vegetarian.

Life is so crazy good though. I agree with him that Zerg could be a little bit weak right now, but that just shows HOW good he is that he was able to beat FLASH of all people!

I have to wonder... what does it say that so far out of 17 professional reviews, you remain the only one to score this game below an 80.

Are you a better reviewer than all of these other publications?

What does it say about the credibility of your reviews for other games?

Lastly, I don't actually believe that you honestly think this game is a 2/5. I think you were disappointed by what it didn't do for you that you were hoping for, that made you miss everything that was great about it. I believe that you may actually enjoy the game of starcraft 2, and I did notice on your website that you had lots of hype posts leading up to it. I'm not sure if you were playing the beta or not, but you should have had plenty of time to already know a lot about all the multiplayer and interface changes.

I'm not 100% convinced that you give the game such a low score in an attempt to attract viewers to your site, as others have stated, because really they obviously aren't going to be the viewers that think too highly of your site. I simply think that you gave the game (40 metacritic points lower than the next lowest review) the score that you did because you couldn't see the forest for all the trees in the way.

Who is Tom Chick?

This review is awful. Actually, all your reviews are pretty awful. The first few sentences should hook me, but it didn't. Instead, I found myself laughing at how boring it was.

5/5 for Brutal Legend? So you're basically saying that Brutal Legend is just as good as games like Ocarina of Time, Uncharted 2, Half Life 2, etc.?

I think you either need better writers or gamers with better taste in video games. This site is just a joke.

That is only half the story.
Quantity is not necessarily over quality, but quality can degrade if there isn't enough quantity. In this case, I believe this review is half baked. The reviewer states that he is qualified to review this game, yet he contradicts himself by saying he doesn't really know what the new units do for the game. He is basically commenting on something where he admits he doesn't know what he is talking about. I don't mind if a reviewer doesn't know the game back to front, but at least get an opinion from somebody who does or something like that.

Another thing I didn't like was the fact that certain points of the game weren't addressed at all. Graphics weren't talked about (Which makes sense in this case I suppose), music and sound design wasn't talked about... heck, gameplay wasn't even a huge component of this review. It almost seems as if the review started off okay, then just jumped on this random tangent about Blizzard being slaves to Activision, then jumped to the story and decided to say how bad that was, then the review suddenly and unexpectedly ends. Where is the talk about big gameplay additions, new features (not just units), sound, music or graphics?

I don't care if the review is 5 words long, but if it doesn't address everything a player may want to know about the game, then it really isn't a great review since it only talks about half the game, and I'm pretty sure only talking about half the game counts for nothing since water at 50 degrees isn't half boiling.

Then you don't spend much time on the internet. Blizzard is the most over hyped company today. They essentially give you slot machines, you keep pulling the lever, and they have a new generation of gambling addicts eating out of their hands. 15$ a month for a tired, grinding, 10-year old MMORPG anyone? Suckers.
Don't listen to them Tom, they just want their tiny little fanboy peckers stroked.
They can't handle honesty.

Because he has decades of experience. Why on Earth do you think your little fanboy opinion means more than his. Tom is one of the pioneers of the game journalist industry and thankfully has the balls to get grief like this for giving an honest review of more blizzard schlock. What have you done for gaming?

I hope you get cancer for making such a fucking dumb remark you low life piece of shit. You wanna compare game reviews to cancer? You are a coward, inbred, slack jawed, mouth breather.

You know what I would love to see Tom? I would love to see you close your forums. You will never change anyones mind, and you don't have to. You are a journalist. You report, and have been doing so as far back as I can remember. I still reread the old Tom vs. Bruce CGW articles. You have the right to state your opinion without listening to nerd rage all night. Be an example, shut the damn comments sections down. I know you would probably give some speech about how all voices need to be heard, but that would be worse than some of the junk spewed in these comment sections. CGW did not need a fucking forum and neither do you. Those of us that know you from back in the day, want to hear your opinion, not these twats. Best of luck.

Tom Chick's mother can keep lick my balls

I found the story to be very, very interesting! I don't get your beef with it!