StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is the sequel to Blizzard Entertainment's 1998 hit StarCraft, which has been hailed. Starcraft In the distant future, a small group of human exiles have been doomed to fight for survival on the edge of the galaxy. StarCraft 2: Legacy of the Void has a late-game mission that encapsulates what its campaign should be. You control the alien Protoss, fighting alongside both a Human and a Zerg base. An overwhelming enemy launches attacks, and other characters discuss how to stop them. Yet you’re the protagonist, shifting your troops from one spot to the next will allow defenses to win, while each successful attack provides a space for you or your allies to move forward. It’s a gloriously chaotic, chatty mess. The problem: It’s just one mission. The bigger problem: It’s just one mission in an epilogue, after 20 missions of the main single-player campaign being about the Protoss dithering around alone, with Kerrigan’s Zerg and Raynor’s Humans barely around. It can be a slog, which is a surprise given Blizzard’s history of success at making real-time strategy campaigns. Check out our for past game reviews. What you’ll like A Blizzard tradition Blizzard’s success in RTS design relies on the combination of two things: a propulsive story and clever mission design. Both have existed in Blizzard games since the original StarCraft and Warcraft 3. The first two installments of StarCraft 2 each had simple, personal stories — Raynor wants to track down Kerrigan, and Kerrigan wants to track down Raynor — which were good enough to hang the games on to, letting the mission and campaign design do their work. Check out our. The mission design of Legacy of the Void stands alongside its predecessors. Few of the missions are straightforward, RTS-style build-base-and-smash-enemy. They try to keep you moving, usually by spreading objectives across the map, forcing you to weigh a smash-and-grab versus maintaining a strong defense. Clever mission design Some of them are exceptionally clever. My favorite had your base on a moving platform, which shifts up and down around a space station on a track, seeking resources and defenses to maintain a battle fleet that would do the bulk of the fighting. Another standout involves an invincible duel between two characters, who gain strength from the presence of nearby allies. Even the traditional hero dungeon of taking a couple of super-characters like Artanis gets a pleasant remix in a late mission in which all of the Protoss characters split up into three wildly different, fast-paced sections. Yet Legacy of the Void can be a little too reliant on the straightforward base defense mission, particularly in the endgame. Free music production software windows 10. Image Credit: Blizzard Entertainment It’s when these missions connect to the wider campaign that issues arise. Legacy of the Void, like both Heart of the Swarm and Wings of Liberty before it, offers a slow campaign of acquiring new units and customizing them. Those customization options are fascinating, as well, with different Protoss factions offering different options, like the Dark Templar Stalker units as a basic assault unit, while the Aiur faction offers a StarCraft I-style Dragoon instead.
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