StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm Review

By – David Queener

Heart of the Swarm is an expansion of StarCraft 2 more in name than content, as you could get away with calling it StarCraft 3 if it functioned as a standalone install. Boasting more content than the base game while picking exactly where it left off, it is a potent release in the StarCraft franchise. In an effort to avoid spoilers, I will state that we find Kerrigan immediately at our command, and through her seek out to unify the Swarm while encountering familiar Terran and Protoss characters from the base game.

Heart of the Swarm has an increased focus on Hero Units lending at times an almost action RPG feel to the game.   This is clearest in that Kerrigan herself levels up and pursues skill tree unlocks as the campaign progresses. This action RPG feel, and tool tips suggesting to use F2 to ″Select Army″ wherein every military unit you have is available for command, emphasizes singular focuses on a lone front, with Kerrigan at the heart of it, to pardon a pun. Unless you’ve got a great group, including Kerrigan is always a great idea.   By the end of the campaign she was able to deal everything from levitating a group of enemies and hitting them with chain lightning to summoning dozens of Zerg, or even a Zerg Leviathan. On top of that, if killed she respawns back at your hive.   Kerrigan is more than a Hero Unit, she is practically the game itself.   Many times I actually felt the experience could have been better handled as a third person action game, especially during the boss rushes (there are boss rushes) and numerous other boss fights (there are boss fights).

Where Wings of Liberty concerns Jim Raynor and Raynor’s Raiders as they cruise the galaxy responding to jobs, cries for help, and intelligence, Heart of the Swarm is the act of following Kerrigan herself as she takes action on her own volition, being swayed only by cases made by others.  Kerrigan is very much a force of her own will and this ties in well with the leveling up her abilities as she grows stronger and stronger.  That will consumes the swarm itself.  Kerrigan’s predilection to psionic ability makes her remarkably gifted for control of the Zerg, and the game encourages this with tech tree options that result in overwhelming numbers which never seem to die. Literally. Hero Units may respawn, but with certain evolutionary paths so do your Zerglings and Ultralisks.  With a little bit of investment, I found myself with three times the normal sized army, moving 60% faster, respawning, and generating fresh troops on the battlefield out of the corpses of my enemy.  Controlling the swarm is akin to steering a tidal wave of claws, barbs, and bile.  It is the greatest victory of Heart of the Swarm, and an incredibly rewarding experience.

An “incredibly rewarding experience” is a phrase you could use to describe many aspects of Heart of the Swarm, as it allows for excellent role reversal from Wings of Liberty while still pushing the franchise’s story forward. Elements which could have been left as they were have been improved, such as the permanent research options available.  In Wings of Liberty, you watched a short video demonstrating the upgrade and were given a text description of it. You still get that, but along with an Evolution Mission, where you guide Zerg on various planets gathering genetic material (″Essence″) to alter a particular Zerg strain.  You then witness that evolution happen on the field, and command the new strain in a short mission.  After seeing your choices by actually controlling them, you choose which sequence to splice into the swarm.

During all this managing of abilities and running of Evolution Missions you will interact with several Zerg who provide backstory and perspective.  This was a curious bit as Blizzard did not have human character tropes to fall back on as they did with the Terrans, but the Zerg were still oddly human.  From what I could tell the Zerg asexually reproduce, mutating from one form into another, splitting off, and spawning lesser forms of themselves which may grow and evolve themselves.  Still, they were represented with distinctly male and female aspects which were mutually exclusive.

″Female″ Zerg had a higher or softer voice, or spines of armor on their chest shaped like human breasts, and were concerned with management and messaging. ″Male″ Zerg were primarily fighters or researchers and spoke with lower voices, bearing nothing which resembled mammary glands.  I know the use of phrases like ″Brood Mother″ are common with the Zerg, and of course ″Queen″, but I couldn’t get a feel for what the Zerg were as a species. This gave them a very sharp impression of being a human creation, and not a creation of a human within the game world, but of individuals at Blizzard.  This ultimately did not hurt my experience, but it broke the mood from time to time.

Heart of the Swarm has many nice details and touches that I appreciated.  The largest ones were the recognition of my activity in Wings of Liberty.  During the previous campaign I had made a handful of distinct choices before missions, and in Heart of the Swarm I saw these decisions still having an impact in the state of the world and mission. This made great strides for me in terms of uniting the two, and making it a complete experience. I enjoyed the role reversal of going from purifying infested areas to being the one spreading the infestation and overwhelming a massive defense.  The experience of modifying my behavior to adjust for environmental vulnerabilities becoming one of modifying my own units to thrive in the environment and strike even harder during a moment of my enemy’s weakness.  On top of all that, someone bothered to write tooltip backstories for the random prisoners in a particular level.

It isn’t all evolutionary pits and creep tumors though; Heart of the Swarm is unfortunately the least stable major release I have played in a very long time.  No fewer than a dozen times did I crash to the desktop and have to recover lost progress.  With a dozen plus crashes across 27 missions, I almost got used to them. It even happened during the final cinematic, requiring a relaunch of the game and accessing the cinematic through the Master Archives, rewatching the beginning. This really hurt the momentum and took me out of the tone of the final events.  On a less severe note, there is a lack of polish in many areas. Prominent cutscenes where a unit kicks in a vent grating and climbs in, multiple times, without damaging or altering the grating.  Units proceeding to quest entities and simply stopping in place until being told, for the second time, to perform the task and beginning such without moving at all. Even debug text appearing in load screens. Simply put, the game has some rough spots in it.

The rough spots continue into the mixture of cutscene style, where some are pre-rendered and look amazing, and others are in-engine looking just fine, many occur within gameplay using the isometric perspective assets and give a sense of watching a home video made with someone’s toys.  The in-engine cutscenes also seem to have an issue with masked texture elements, such as Kerrigan’s eyelashes and Raynor’s locks of hair removing all blurring for the backdrop behind them within those spaces, resulting in a ″halo of clarity″ around their eyes.  At times characters visibly clip themselves with animations, or turn to show an untextured asset.  One cutscene involved characters discussing between a pool of rippling water, with the camera alternating touching the pool at the top or the bottom of the screen and that respective portion of the letterboxing rippling with the water.

The real problem comes in the sharp difference between the pre-rendered cutscenes and the gameplay, and it isn’t one of graphical fidelity, but of actual activity.  In the pre-rendered cutscenes the humans flank about intelligently, flying units take evasive action, air to ground units attack clusters in strafing passes, while large armies attack like large armies engaging a front rather than single sets of coordinates.  In the gameplay the units require extensive micromanagement, to the point of being more of a tactics game than a strategy game.  Like managing a herd of uninterested ducks, you practically need to instruct the lifting of each individual foot. Yes this does provide more control, but it also is a chore.  I’ve been told by many people that this is a skill ceiling matter, but it seems to encourage the wrong skill sets for the chosen genre.  To make matters worse, Blizzard’s own cinematics depict the behaviors I want to see in the gameplay, and at times it feels like they were giving me a sneak peek of something they hope to eventually make.

The story does have two strange aspects to it, with the introduction of the Primal Zerg which seem to go almost nowhere beyond being a basis for giving Kerrigan lots of levels to unlock new abilities, and the elements around the Xel’Naga and a greater force, which are spoken of as something ″from the stars″, an odd appeal considering everyone is already in the stars.  These aspects feel very incomplete, but thankfully do not get in the way, and Blizzard still has the Protoss expansion to cover these things.

Heart of the Swarm ultimately has strength in its strong ties to Wings of Liberty and extensive mission variety.  Blizzard has many clever missions that utilize weather systems, capturing temples to weaken great powers (in a Harry Potter styled ″Wizard’s Duel″ scene), alternating strikes around great forcefields that ebb and flow across the battlefield, taking over a Protoss ship in mid-travel (a memorably sad mission), and even commanding the Hyperion ship itself.  The mission design of Heart of the Swarm is the saving grace, its contribution to the story arc and the lore of the Zerg are excellent.  Though they never did answer why Kerrigan has Zerg Creep high heels.

Is It Worth The Money?

Yes.  If you enjoyed Wings of Liberty it definitely is.  If you are simply interested in StarCraft 2 as a whole, you will most likely find a lot to love.  It is an expansion only in install requirements, in all other measures, it is a whole game.