So I was pretty pumped for LOTV.  The hints we’d received about Amon had prepared me for him to be a fun villain without overplaying their hand for what he would be for long gaps between the games.

The mission gameplay is pretty similar to the earlier two games.  Some fun gimmick missions, the missions where you primarily control a hero and can’t build a base are even more sparing, it feels, and less of a chore.  While some of the missions have a fun angle, I found most to be less than fun, but I might not be giving them all a fair shake.

The metagame advancement is worse IMO than the other games, but it’s not a major thing.  The two sets of choices you’re making throughout are units to fit a slot/type (like the previous two) and abilities for your ship (which include passive abilities like you were choosing for buildings in WoL and active abilities like you were choosing for Kerrigan in HotS).  The problem with your unit choices is that you’re choosing one of three to fill a much broader type with poor decisions.  Some of there minor differences, like choosing between the zealot type you have.  Others are choosing one unit that you would have anyway in multiplayer/custom games over another, like Tempest or Carrier for capital ship.  This allows for a few interesting things, like the return of the thing that shoots roaches from SC1 or BW, but normally is at best boring and at worst limiting your toys.  The only redeeming factor of this is that in the campaign Carriers have a repair probe that automatically repairs mechanical units, so the key to winning becomes stacking a shitload of carriers and colossi and maybe a few void rays to stomp anything imaginable.  The ship abilities work a lot like Kerrigan’s abilities in that you’re buying them with a resource you accumulate through bonus objective.  The only problem though is that almost all of the active abilities fucking suck, and the passive abilities force you to choose between things I would rather have both of than another active ability, even the upgraded version.

The real problem though, with the campaign, is that the story blows monkey cock.  They built this up to be a really cool and climactic ending, but you’re dealing with no more novel social dynamics between characters on your ship than you were in the first two games, and it’s impossible to care.  I kept checking the missions left hoping that it would get exciting soon, but it didn’t.  I remember reading the SC1 manual (and if you haven’t read all the lore you will have no fucking clue what’s going on in this) thinking that most people would think the Protoss story is not cool but I did.  I realize now that this impression was just indicative of bad writing.  Even looking things up to verify I had the story right, it didn’t ever matter to me.  The game asks you to care a lot about the Tal’Darim, Amon, Moebius Corps, and unnamed Protoss you’ve never seen.  It was easy for them to introduce new characters and factions, like the UED and Nova, that people could readily care about in earlier games, but these are all boring as shit.  There’s exactly three Protoss from previous games that make an appearance here, and for a race that’s honestly this dull, you have to rely more heavily on established cast.  A resurrected Adun, Alders, and/or Raszagal would’ve been more than welcome.  The campaign is divided up into three parts, which I can’t tell you is the same as others, because in the other games I wasn’t so desperately hoping the game would end soon.  There’s the bullshit intro that feels like it doesn’t matter, then taking care of three things that you need to be ready for the final battle, and the final battle.  Only the last part was any good in terms of gameplay and story really clicking, and it was underwhelming as hell for the end of Starcraft 2.  There’s an Epilogue in which Artanis, Raynor, and Kerrigan work together to do some stupid bullshit and a cinematic that’s an insulting end to the series.

OUTSIDE OF THE CAMPIGN: CUSTOM GAMES/MULTIPLAYER CHANGES

There’s a few changes to units and other stuff.  Protoss get a cool new ranged unit from their gateway that’s cheaper and more interesting than stalkers.  They also got the most useless fucking thing ever called a disruptor that they spawn at their robot thing.  Disruptors suck cock, and have a manual attack on a super long cool down that does okay area damage that is in no way worth the effort by anyone.  Zerg get lurkers from Brood War back who are pretty cool, not sure if they got anything else because I played with them so little in custom games in HotS.  Terran got an alright unit from their factory that has a nifty special attack that can auto-cast, and what basically amounts to a flying siege tank.  It can normally only attack air units, but if you shift it into its special mode it stops moving and attacks ground units for fuckloads of damage.  Also controversially, battleships are now the most OP fucking thing in the game, with the ability to teleport anywhere, whether there’s vision or not.

Serious players said multiplayer is ruined forever because they’ve significantly lowered the amount of resources in mineral nodes and vespene geysers, so that you have to expand much more quickly and losing expansions is much more fatal.  You also start with more workers, so many bum-rush strategies are out the door.  In my few custom games I played, this definitely feels less fun because you have to move out against opponents much faster and can’t amass a fully supply-capped army, which is something I enjoy.

tl;dr IT’S SHIT, GG BLIZZARD