Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm Review

PC (version played), Mac
By Blizzard Entertainment
Rating: 12
Released: 12th March 2013

Starcraft 2 has a long shadow, made longer by it only recently emerging out of the darkness cast by its predecessor, the seminal sci-fi strategy game that was the original Starcraft. Both are exquisitely made multiplayer games, to the degree that an incredibly thriving professional scene has emerged, with players earning a more than comfortable living by winning tournaments and competitions.

It’s inside this twin shadows that Heart of the Swarm has to emerge as something unique and worthy. It’s halfway between an expansion and a sequel, and that confusion of identity just about works in its favour. On the one hand you have an impressive continuation of Starcraft 2’s single player campaign, following the story of Sarah Kerrigan, picking up where Jim Raynor’s tale from the first game left off.

And on the other, there’s the multiplayer component, which really is just expansive rather than revolutionary. When Blizzard, the developers of Starcraft, have spent so much time tweaking and balancing their game to make sure it’s just right for competitive and casual audiences both, you don’t want to start just throwing in ingredients wholesale. You never know what you might screw up with overpowered new units, broken new game modes and poorly crafted maps. A beta can only tell you so much.

Which means that Heart of the Swarm adds just seven new ‘units’, with a few just being upgrades to existing units. The temptation is to decry this as lazy, but that would display an ignorance of both what Blizzard do, and how much effect a single unit can have on how Starcraft 2 is played. Blizzard don’t want to rock the boat, the want to make it faster and more fun to sail.

The Zerg (who are the stars of the game’s single player) and Terran factions both get two new units, and the Protoss come away with a princely three, which belies how the competitive scene is sitting at the moment. Each of them are designed to plug a hole in a faction’s roster, and provide more versatility and less opportunity for their opponents to take advantage of unintended weaknesses. A unit like the Zerg’s new Swarm Host provides the ability to easily defend a constantly advancing front line, with it being essentially a walking unit production facility, spewing short-lived locusts at the enemy whenever its burrowed in the ground.

It’s rare that you come across a game that has such an odd dichotomy between its singleplayer and multiplayer modes, where they can’t be entirely divorced from one another, in the style of something like Call of Duty where the two are loosely linked by location and weapon types, but with every other rule changed. Instead, Starcraft has a shaky truce between both modes, where the intention and execution of each is aimed at a completely different type of player.

Make no mistake; there will be hundreds of thousands of people who buy Heart of the Swarm caring not a jot about the single player. They will lay down a fair amount of money for those seven units, and the changes to the multiplayer. Because they’re getting everything they need from those seemingly small changes; it’s a small evolution, but it will have big repercussions. They’re the zealots, the die-hard fans that play many games a week.

But to say that Heart of the Swarm was entirely for them would be ignoring a huge part of what pushes it beyond the bounds of an expansion and closer to a sequel. The singleplayer campaign is big, and while not quite as big as Starcraft 2’s, it benefits greatly from being a tighter, more narratively focused experience.

There are no side missions here beyond the occasional evolution mission that allows you to test a permanent permutation to a single unit before deciding between the two options. Everything else is one story mission after the other, as Kerrigan has the Zerg swarm tear a swathe through Terran and Protoss forces alike in an effort to get her revenge for some affront or another. It’s melodramatic space opera, but with Blizzard’s production values it’s entertaining fare.

More importantly, the missions themselves are interesting variances on the classic ‘build a base and then build an army and then win’ formula that quickly becomes so rote. One particular highlight is a base defence mission where two other armies are constantly clashing in another part of the map, with multiple optional objectives on the other side of them. You can ignore the entire conflict, or try to spear through it for a juicy handful of rewards.

The only problems come out of the odd little tweaks Blizzard have made to the way that the Zerg forces operate. It’s all in the name of accessibility, removing some of the micro that makes Starcraft so simultaneously daunting and deeply complex, but it teaches bad habits to anyone who wants to transfer their skills learnt in the singleplayer into the online space against other players. The worst offender is the way larvae spawn out of Hatchery; in multiplayer, they cap out at three active at any one time, whereas in single player the number is way higher, only stopping once there are nine. It means you can all but forget about it until you need a quick booster of reinforcements, instead of the constant management required in the multiplayer.

Small changes like this proliferate through the singleplayer campaign, and they certainly make the experience smoother for the uninitiated. And perhaps they’re lessons that can be quickly unlearnt once you’re thrown into the gauntlet of competing against another human, but it seems like a relatively needless complication when the actual mechanics aren’t all that unwieldy in the first place.

Regardless, by the time the campaign ramps up for its climax you’ll hardly be worrying about the minutia. The Zerg are characterised by their huge hordes, and as you storm enormous complexes and assault expansive bases, you’ll get close to the ridiculous swarm illustrated in the highly expensive CGI intro movie shown at the beginning of the game. It’s chaos, and the thrill of not necessarily controlling it, but merely channelling the torrent in the direction of your enemies, is a powerful one, and well deserved by the time you get to it.

Heart of the Swarm sits halfway between an expansion and a sequel, yes, but also halfway between casual and competitive, singleplayer and multi, offering a huge amount and not really all that much at all. It’s bombastic and reserved, overwrought and beautifully finessed. The real question is whether it’s a worthy successor to the behemoth that is Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty, and if that’s the kind of question you’re asking, then the answer is yes.