Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void (2015) - Review

"My Life for Aiur."

AH Starcraft 2, my favourite RTS franchise. I never knew or got into the first Starcraft but when I played wings of liberty back when it was released, I got immediately hooked to the story and the gameplay. Been waiting a long time for this last part of the trilogy, and the franchise, to come out, and finally got enough time to replay the previous two parts and finish this all in one go.

Legacy of the Void is a protoss focused campaign like how Wings of Liberty was for Terrans and Heart of the Swarm was for the Zerg. And it is about time we finally get to play as them.

Things I liked:

• The cinematic storytelling returned better than ever. The story continues from where Heart of the Swarm left off, with Amon's threat getting bigger and graver. It all had this Mass Effect feel to it and considering it is my favourite game (trilogy) of all time, I was really digging and enjoying the story. Old faces return, alliances are created, armies are forged, all that good shit.
• Blizzard once again showed that they are the gods of CGI cut scenes. From that epic opening scene to various others throughout the game, they were really a sight to behold. And not only that, the in-game cutscenes were pretty great as well.
• The Protagonist: Artanis. I didn't really knew much about him but I immediately liked him. He was your usual young leader type character but his execution was good enough that you felt like a leader yourself when playing the game.
• The side characters were pretty good and varying. And it was great conversing with them between missions as each had different views about their kind and factions and it just gave you a great insight to how protoss think of each other.
• Like in the previous parts, good to great voice acting, making characters more interesting.
• Best soundtrack in the trilogy hand down. It was so great.
• A pretty well rounded conclusion to a great story. Sure I wanted more closure, as with all the endings, but what I got was still great.
• The gameplay design was really great. Almost all of the missions required you to create different types of units to properly succeed instead of spamming one or two unit types, and I liked this forceful diversity.
• The Spear of Adun mechanic was a great add-on. Tons of abilities that you could experiment with in each mission and they were great and fun to use. Also, because of it, every bonus objective had more weight to it since finishing them would give you more resources to use Adun's abilities. This resulted in me trying to finish all the bonus objectives first in each mission.
• Each unit type changes were really great as well. As the game progresses, you open up new types of the unit and can choose and experiment in different missions.

Things I didn't liked:

• While the game graphics aren't bad or anything, they look almost the same like they did 5 years ago when Wings of Liberty came out. I mean it would have been nice to have some big improvement over them.
• Majority of the missions had a real same-y feeling. They got too monotonous. The structure was almost the same i.e main target needs to be destroyed but has this many points that needs to be taken out first etc etc.
• Story does get cheesy or bit heavy handed at times, which was the issue in previous two parts as well. Small nitpick on my part since I love it regardless.

All in all, I had a real blast re-playing the previous parts again and finally playing this. Was a great couple of days and really creates the momentum to enjoy this epic galactic tale. Starcraft 2 is easily my favourite RTS of all time, and really, there is no other RTS that focuses so much on its campaign and I applaud Blizzard for putting so much effort into it. Wings of Liberty remains my favourite part overall.

As always, when something great ends, a layer of sadness is present, and I will miss this franchise, but at the same time I'm glad it ended on a high not cause too many games/franchises screw up their endings.

9/10