Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm (

2013

) ½

On the whole Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty [2010] was a sound update to the classic Starcraft [1998] mechanics, hampered slightly by the fact that the plot of its campaign and the motivations of its characters were complete nonsense. Some manager at Blizzard, in between hitting on female interns in a Bill Cosby-themed hotel room and stealing breast milk from the communal fridge, must have realized that his staff of sex-offender male-feminists and traumatized diversity hires were simply incapable of writing a plot with any degree of complexity. Old Blizzard could regularly push the envelope of what was possible in the medium of interactive storytelling, nu-Blizzard not so much. So, in a remarkably humble move, the plot of Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm was boiled down to Kerrigan wanting to get revenge on Arcturus Mengsk. She spends the entire campaign working towards that goal, and the last battle is her besieging Mengsk's palace while the final cut scene depicts her killing the bastard. It's not exactly Shakespeare, but at least everyone's motivations and actions mostly make sense. I would congratulate Nu-Blizzard for learning how to work within their limitations, but it feels wrong to praise someone for giving up.

Even then, the plot has an issue so significant that it will almost certainly annoy any players paying even the slightest bit of attention. Halfway through the game, Kerrigan goes back to being the Queen of Blades, and even before that her personality reverts to the same ruthless bitch we remember from Starcraft: Brood War [1998]. On the one hand, I like this because Kerrigan The Queen of Blades was a fun, unapologetically evil antagonist, who was a delight to watch back-stab and murder her way through the campaigns. Seriously, the Zerg campaign of Starcraft: Brood War [1998] is a delight in no small part because of how much of an absolute bastard it lets the player be. On the other hand, having Kerrigan immediately turn back into the Zerg queen makes everything that happened in Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty [2010] completely pointless. Jeez, Blizzard just because I said the plot made no sense doesn't mean you have to do a hard reset to the characters and world halfway through your next campaign!

The story picks up where its predecessor left off, with Sarah Kerrigan now free from Zerg infection and in the custody of Jim Raynor and Valerian Mengsk. Arcturus seeing that his son is in cahoots with his greatest enemies, rightly assumes that Valerian is planning a coup and moves to destroy both him, the pirate Raynor, and the newly human Sarah Kerrigan. Sure, Valerian claims that he is just trying to prove himself to his dad, but if that is the case why is he keeping Kerrigan alive and breeding an army of Zerg in his compound?

It's unfortunate for Mengsk though, as Kerrigan and Jim had both just decided to abandon any quest for vengeance against Mengsk and just run off together, so his attempt to prevent his downfall only ensures it. During the attack, Jim is captured by Mengsk, and for some inscrutable reason, Mengsk decides to spare him and shove him aboard a prison ship. Never mind that he spent all the last game trying to kill Raynor, going so far as to use Tychus as an assassin. Kerrigan, believing Jim is dead, swears vengeance against Mengsk and goes to regain her control over the Zerg swarm. By the time she finds out that Jim is still alive and held prisoner, it's far too late for her to turn back. She has already transformed once again into the Queen of Blades, with few traces of her humanity remaining.

However, those few traces of her humanity are a bit of a sticking point for me. Kerrigan in the old games was a ruthless, heartless, monster; The “Queen Bitch of the Universe” as she herself aptly put it. Her cruelty, her willingness to fuck over anyone and everyone who got in her way, and her complete inhumanity were what made the character so damn fun. In attempting to make her more sympathetic, Starcraft II: Heart of the Swam instead makes her more boring. It's the same mistake that Maleficent (2014) made, by trying to turn its iconic irredeemable bad guy into a sympathetic anti-hero it must sacrifice the very thing that made the villain so compelling in the first place. Unfortunately, the institutional capture of the video game industry means that female characters must be less interesting than what we are used to to ward off fraudulent accusations of sexism (and when your company has as much actual sexual abuse going on as Blizzard, you need all the breathing room you can get). Oh well, at least Blizzard was able to keep almost everyone's motivations straight in this game, that is some cause to celebrate.

Though, even with the reduced scope of the plot, Blizzard still manages to slip a fuck-up or two in. Here it comes in the form of Narud, who had a brief appearance as the head of the Mobius Foundation in Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty [2010]. In this game it is revealed that he is the same being as Samir Duran (hence the name) from Starcraft: Brood War [1998], with the explanation given that he is an immortal Xel-Naga shapeshifter serving the evil and mysterious Amon. There is only one problem with this, the Mobius Foundation was trying to assemble the artifact that ultimately allowed Jim Raynor to save Kerrigan, and the last thing that Amon and his underlings want is to have Kerrigan alive and uninfected, as she is literally the only thing in the galaxy that can stop him. Why not sabotage the artifact, or deliberately scatter the pieces, or just not help Raynor and Valerian assemble the damn thing? Better yet, why not get rid of the whole shape-shifting Narud nonsense altogether and just have him be Duran with no ties to the Mobius Foundation at all? It would make more sense and give players a chance to vent their frustrations on the sneakiest snake in all of Starcraft: Brood War [1998]. I fear this is a plot point leftover from Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty [2010] that they couldn't get rid of, and not even Blizzard can keep the plot of that game straight.

On the whole, this is very much a continuation of the same game as last time, with Heart of the Swarm sharing most of the same strengths and weaknesses as its predecessor. Though in at least one case it is decidedly worse than Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty [2010]. Heart of the Swarm has opted to keep the same Mass Effect [2007] style crew system as its predecessor, where in-between missions you return to your command ship and have the option to talk to your crew of support characters. The problem here is that all the support characters this time are inhuman monsters that speak in flat robotic monotones. If you struggled to care about the crew of the Hyperion then Kerrigan's assortment of drone-like underlings will have you falling asleep as they prattle about manipulating essence and more efficiently using the swarm. The only redeeming factor is that most of the dialogue is optional, so you won't have to listen to much of their inane ramblings.

Quibbles aside though there is still a lot to like about Heart of the Swarm. The missions here are much more varied and interesting than Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty [2010]. Yes, most will have the usual gimmicks, but every so often you will be charged with assaulting and destroying an entrenched enemy position. It's nice to actually play something approaching a normal game of Starcraft now and then during the campaign.

The main difference is the inclusion of Kerrigan for almost every mission, a single hero unit that when fully powered up is roughly the equivalent of an entire death stack. As the game progresses and you complete main objectives and side-missions Kerrigan will get more and more powerful, unlocking new spells and passive abilities you can switch around between missions. On lower difficulty, Kerrigan is just flat-out broken. You will only need her to clear through most of the opposition and can leave most of your army relaxing back at your base. Even on Brutal, her presence on the field negates most of the enemy's advantage, and on Normal difficulty, you might as well just type in “There is no cow level” and save yourself the time.

In the larger history of the Starcraft franchise and Blizzard, Heart of the Swarm probably signals the end of the company's incompetent attempts at re-creating their past glories, and the start of them simply coasting on their laurels. Unlike with Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty [2010], Blizzard now knows that they cannot write stories with any more complexity than “Get revenge on the bad guy” and they are no longer interested in trying. The game itself is still solid, but only because almost all the work for Starcraft II was done long before Heart of the Swarm entered into production. The real fuck-ups for the company were still off in the future, and casual observers could even fool themselves into thinking that maybe Blizzard had turned a corner and would gradually work its way back to being the paragon developer it was in the 1990s and early 2000s. Ahh, to see the world again with such optimism and naivete. In truth, one of the greatest developers in video game history still had a very long way to fall, and in the latter half of the 2010s, we were going to see just what abominable pits it could descend.