Between its decks, and in addition to more opportunities for conversation and plot embellishment, are the menus that allow for army management and special powers. The big new toy at the centre of this campaign is the Spear of Adun, a mothership that acts as a base for the Protoss and also as a customisation tool. A "Normal" campaign is challenging, but never cruel, constantly pressing the player without suffocating them, while the "Brutal" setting will happily suit any masochistic, octopus-limbed micro veterans of old who might be brave enough to try it. What's more, Blizzard has done a fine job of getting the balance right. Within a framework so established, so traditional, little is allowed to go stale. The single-player campaign constantly changes gears, only sometimes offering the traditional RTS staple of base-building and resource gathering, mixing these in with races against time, with co-operative missions, with chances to control hero characters at key points.
Distinct and polished design helps make each level feel different.Īnd is it even a space opera? Legacy of the Void is much closer to a space panto but, like any good pantomime, it gets you involved, it gives you your part to play and it leaves you feeling, if not enriched, certainly entertained. You may not care about the planet you're defending or the reason for your last stand, but it doesn't make those missions any less frantic, any less challenging or any less good. But it is pretty cool to play as Kerrigan and Artanis, to help them stomp and smash their way through hordes of enemies, using both passive and active abilities in a way that feels almost like an action RPG. You may find it very cool to see Kerrigan and Artanis fighting side by side, or you may not care for it at all. Blizzard's extremely fancy cinematics, impressive and dynamic, are all explosions or revelations or epiphanies, with wall to ceiling bad dialogue ("Much has changed since your era!" "No! It cannot be!") and an almost constant raising of the stakes. Cutscene after cutscene, dialogue after dialogue shows keeps you up to date with every beat in the the story of the noble Protoss and their battle again the really quite trendily-dressed black-and-red forces of the Big Bad Amon. It's absolutely bursting with plot, plot all the time. Legacy of the Void builds Starcraft's ridiculously overwrought story to a grand and melodramatic climax, doing so while still managing to somehow, somehow teach their old dog some new tricks. But it's to Blizzard's credit that Legacy of the Void is able to take what is one of real-time strategy's most traditional formulas and still find ways to tweak its inputs to produce satisfying, engaging and even outright exciting results. We've been doing this sort of thing for two decades (think about that, two decades) and perhaps, in the hands of another developer, it would now be boring.
We should be bored of constructing additional pylons. We should be bored of fixed isometric perspectives. We should be bored of dragging cursors across great twitching throngs of identical units.
We'll be following up with a feature on the multiplayer in the near future. Editor's note: Given StarCraft 2's split between single-player and multiplayer - and the different demands made by both modes - we're splitting our impressions, leading with this piece by Paul Dean on the campaign.
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