Starcraft II: Legacy of the Void | Review
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Platforms: PC
Starcraft II: Legacy of the Void is the second and final standalone expansion in Blizzard's Starcraft II Trilogy. Though, to call it an expansion simply does not do this game justice. While at first myself and many other players may have felt short-changed at the copy/paste nature of the game's mechanics from the original Starcraft, Legacy of the Void looks, and plays like the culmination of all Blizzard has learned since Starcraft was released in 1998. That's a long time to perfect your craft...it's a long time to perfect your Starcraft.
For those unfamiliar with the series, Starcraft is a fast paced RTS game about harvesting resources, building a base and assaulting enemies with a variety of both ground and air units. Each of the 3 games in the Starcraft II trilogy has focused on one of the 3 factions that each control quite differently. Different strategies work for each faction but each is more than capable of reacting to any combat situation quickly.
In Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty you played as the Terrans, a future version of the human race and arguably the easiest race to get to grips with. In Heart of the Swarm you played as the Zerg, an insect like race relying on large numbers of cheap (but relatively weak) units. In Legacy of the Void you play as the Protoss, a technologically advanced alien race who use powerful (but expensive) units. Of course, all 3 races are available to play in skirmish and multiplayer modes but for now our focus is the singleplayer campaign.
Those who've played the other Starcraft II games will find no surprises in how the campaign is played. As before, the missions play out as quasi-tutorials, giving access to one new unit per mission, with that unit usually being most useful in that particular mission. This gives the entire campaign a perfect sense of pacing and also serves as a brilliant way to prepare players for some gruelling online play if they choose to compete. It's actually quite impressive that Blizzard managed to keep this formula for 3 consecutive games and not have it feel like you were playing the longest tutorial in video game history. Incentivising the completion of side objectives by rewarding you with your ship upgrades goes a long way to prevent the game falling in to that trap.
Nevertheless, It's hard to say that Legacy of the Void has any real mission variety. Attack a thing, defend a thing, attack 3 things whilst also defending a thing. but what I can say is that simply using the Protoss and its huge variety of incredibly useful units & finding the different ways units compliment each other...that is where the bulk of the fun in Legacy of the Void lies. The Protoss shields for instance which, if used in combination with shield regenerating units or structures, can sometimes prevent your units from taking any damage at all. Using the Protoss is quite a power trip and that's a feeling I never got from using the other factions. That's not to say that the factions aren't balanced. As Starcraft is one of the biggest "esports" around, Blizzard have been regularly tweaking the game since Wings of Liberty and continue to do so after Legacy of the Void's release.
One of the most interesting parts of the campaign is taking control of one of the various main characters of the game as hero units. These hero units have various powerful abilities which play in to your mission strategy and are incredibly satisfying to use. This is a carry over from my favourite Blizzard game Warcraft 3, in which the hero units actually level up throughout the campaign. It's a feature I would like to see more of but hero units in this game were used sparingly so as to focus on the different types of regular units.
A unique feature of Starcraft II is found in your time between missions. Again in Legacy of the Void, you can roam around your character's starship, point-and-click style. Here you can upgrade your ship, giving you access to the various 'super weapon' style abilities of the campaign. You can also augment your units with various upgrades, changing their abilities and appearance in preparation for the next mission. Finally, you can speak to various characters, which flesh out the game's already deep story.
In this way and many others, Starcraft II's narrative really does put all other RTS games to shame. The Starcraft universe has a deep lore but it manages to make the characters the focal point of this story. As the stakes have risen astronomically throughout this trilogy, the characters have grown to care for each other more and more...and in turn, this makes the player care too. The leaders of each faction are all technically 'the good guys' but Blizzard manage to keep the variety up in terms of who you're fighting by introducing many sub-factions and incidental encounters, whereby one faction is unintentionally getting in the way of another's goals.
Despite the story's overall polish and drive, I must admit I wasn't really enamoured with the first 2 stories of the Starcraft II trilogy or the original Starcraft for that matter. The story in Legacy of the Void is different. It begins on a decidedly more epic note than the previous games and proceeds to ramp it up & up & even further up, right until the closing moments of the game. The game hits so many high notes on such a consistent basis with its story that by the time I finished the game's heart wrenching prologue, I was absolutely hooked. I felt overwhelmed by the superb voice acting, striking and colourful visuals & character design and a booming, expressive orchestral score always ready to tease out that extra bit of emotion from a perfectly executed cutscene.
It's incredibly surprising then, to me at least, that Starcraft II is known and played primarily for its multiplayer. A massive amount of interesting aspects about playing the Protoss faction in the campaign are lacking from the multiplayer. The superweapons, heroes, all the different unit upgrades which provide such a massive amount of variety and even the Protoss shield battery and monolith defensive buildings which were a massive part of my strategy are all completely absent from multiplayer and skirmish. I suppose this is for the sake of balance and because Starcraft is such a competitive game but this is probably going to be where a lot of people simply quit.
You see, the campaign is all about choosing which units to produce that will compliment each other to form a sound strategy. The multiplayer however, is about expanding and sucking up as many resources, as quickly as possible, to then pump out units as quickly as possible and keep a constant stream of units harassing the enemy at all times. It is in this sense, that the multiplayer (in my opinion) is severely lacking in strategy and gets insanely repetitive almost immediately. The matches are, by design, incredibly fast paced and over very quickly. I prefer longer, more methodical RTS matches, some people might prefer shorter matches but in Legacy of the Void Blizzard decided to make a few changes to the multiplayer to make the matches even quicker.
Fewer resources are found at each resource point on the map, so they run out quicker, forcing you to expand earlier and more often. You also start with double the resource gatherers of previous games, up from 6 to 12.
As much as I find the people who are really good at Starcraft amazingly talented, it's a bit of a disappointment that you must pretty much master the game to stand any chance at all with multiplayer. Unless you memorise every hotkey (and always use them) and make sure you NEVER EVER STOP producing units, expanding, gathering resources, producing resource gatherers, giving multiple waypoint commands to units, building defenses and for the love of god, always use the hotkeys!...I seriously would not recommend playing Starcraft II online.
If the online play had all the features available in the campaign, especially the ability to use and customise your own hero unit...Well then I probably wouldn't be writing this review right now. I'd be practicing Starcraft II in preparation for tournament after tournament, because then it really would be the most enjoyable RTS experience ever and I wouldn't be able to resist going pro.
In closing I would say that Starcraft II: Legacy of the Void is the most mechanically interesting of the trilogy. It lets the player feel like a force to be reckoned with, while still providing a challenge in terms of strategic planning. The only let down is the multiplayer which feels like a different game entirely to me but for those of you who do play Starcraft online...wow, you are amazing! Legacy of the Void is also the absolute pinnacle of real-time strategy in terms of storytelling and it's well worth playing through all the other games to get to this point. It's so good in fact that it's made me appreciate the other games in the series a lot more and want to go back to experience the story from the beginning.
(Disclosure: This article was originally created for Gamesnosh.com)
