Does Starcraft II really need Heart of the Swarm?

Jesus, that screenshot is enough to keep me from wanting to ever play it. I hate stupid long term leveling up your multiplayer character mechanics in an RTS.

Oh the irony.

quantity > quality, evidently.

If you think they are good storytellers...well, you may want to read more stories.

In a game called heart of the swarm how in the world can you possibly suggest that Kerrigan's presence is a spoiler?

You get this kind of reaction for any kind of less than glowing review. Even for giving negative reviews of crappy games that tanked, I would still find people on official boards for those games calling me a moron.

Its probably one of those banner ads that shows ads based on your browsing history. But that is kind of funny.

Tom Chick you are the most incompetent person I have ever managed to find on the internet.

Did you deliberately right this fucking retarded review to get traffic on your website?

I guess you must think every game ever is terrible then because they all have fanboys like that.

A hire Alexa ranking which he can use to leverage more revenue from adds.

Just a thought.

You don't appreciate the impact because you barely play the fucking game. That upgrade is a huge game changer for zerg and any player not in bronze would realize it.

I don't understand why Tom Chick STILL doesn't get how metacritic works. You can go on that website and it details exactly how every score breaks down.

See the beauty of Tom's system is he can troll for hits by giving games atrocious scores while riding the high horse of his "I review with my own scale" bullshit.

Wait, so despite the fact that at every opportunity possible you bash metacritic and complain about it causing people to misinterpret the scores you give you feel that should still be represented on that website (even though you're knowingly fucking up the average by reviewing on a scale that you yourself say doesn't match up with what metacritic uses)? Is that about the gist of what you're saying?

How can you honestly tell people you're not doing all this bullshit for hits?

Yea? How's the multiplayer community of C&C? Supreme commander?

On the contrary, you couldn't be more wrong. There is actually a trend among some unscrupulous businesses to create bad publicity so as to become more well known. I've never been to this site until today, because I was curious as to the ONE negative review on HOtS from metacritic. For driving traffic, it simply worked. Want proof? Count the comments on AC3, Mass Effect 3, and other popular titles that were given good reviews by this site. The most comments each of those had was 23; this review has 178 as of the time of this writing.

If he's 'trolling for hits', it apparently worked on you.

I Have a question fo the reviewer: do you really believe that this game, as a whole, is this bad (score of 4.0)? I mean, Wol plus Hots. Or are you simply reviewing the expansion? I'm sorry, two questions...hehe.. the other one: don't you think that this game (Hots), by today's standards, isn't actually a good game, at the very least? A mean, we have nice enough graphics, a good soundtrack, a gameplay the most peaple do like...the basics of at least a good game are here. I think that maybe you EXPECTED something else from the game and the choices blizzard made in the last few years might have influenced you in this review, which was ultimately biased, in my most humble opinion.

Thanks for your time and sorry for any possible spelling mistakes, I'm brazilian.

Yeah I've been watching mlg this weekend and terran has been dominating so far. I didn't realize they changed the medivac so much; drops seem like they'll be much harder to deal with with this expansion. I'm not quite ready to say they're op yet, but I do hope someone comes up with a solid way to deal with them soon.

I got the idea that you were labeling the expansion a ripoff from your introduction - "However you do the math, a few new units is pretty much what you’re getting with this add-on. Unless you count the campaign, but why on earth would you do that?" The tone I saw through your text was one that seemed to dismiss pretty much everything Blizzard did, aside from the few new units.

As for the idea that you didn't like that multiplayer - okay Tom, you got me there. I'm a pretty big Starcraft 2 fan, and I let my emotions interpret your text for me. Stupid emotions - I should probably punch them next time they bug me. Reading it again I see that you appreciate it for what it is, but its' not really your thing. Also in the comments I see you like playing 2v2s, so that's cool. My bad on that one, I need to read slower.

As for all that other stuff - I half agree with you. The UI refresh was built for this expansion, but you have don't Heart of the Swarm to have it. I'm not sure if you should count that for a review. While not part of the expansion per se, all the maps and mods are greatly enhanced by all the new tile sets and units in the game, and the map pool did receive a substantial update when the expansion hit. So while your right - it's not part of the expansion, I would argue that a lot of this stuff wouldn't exist without the expansion.

As someone who's been a really big fan of the game (master league 2v2 and diamond 1v1!) I know that this expansion has had a massive positive impact on the game. To me, the changes they made to existing units like the ultra, hydra, reaper, siege tank, raven mothership and infestor (to only name a few) combined with the new units, UI, and map pool make for a game that plays very different and substantially better than vanilla Starcraft.

I really liked your review - it made me laugh. I've been a fan of your writing since I first saw it in GFW (Tom vs Bruce!), I just thought your tone was too dismissive that's all.