A Swarm Interlude
I just finished Heart of the Swarm’s campaign. You know, that expansion to some game called Starcraft 2? The Good: It’s fun. The campaign on normal is a little bit on the easy side, but it’s a fun romp through a middling revenge tale. The units all seem to have a point and purpose. Expanding a Zerg base is fun, and expanding the creep is wicked fun. I have mild OCD about spreading the creep across the entire map, every time. The cutscenes are pretty, if sometimes silly. Kerrigan, your main heroine, gains abilities and gets to customize her swarmlings as the campaign progresses, which provides satisfying variations. Those are all variations on swarm the enemy with lots of bugs, but it’s a fun theme to play variations on. The various mission types are a nice variation on build-swarm-repeat, with timed missions, control point and DOTA inspired elements showing up in various places. The Bad: Streaming cutscenes are annoying as crap. I never got a high quality cutscene in my entire playthrough. If you leave the game, the downloader apparently stops downloading. Some of the load times are interminable, with no indication of how long remains. Some of the pacing Continue Reading →