14 DAY TRIAL // I don’t know if there are sharks in the Starcraft universe, but the series has clearly jumped over one within the first half of the new Heart of the Swarm campaign when Sarah Kerrigan, ex-Queen of Blades turned human once more, decided how to shape her future and that of the galaxy.
I won’t go into spoilers because the narrative that Blizzard creates needs to be experienced, if not for its quality at least for the way it manages to mix science fiction and soap opera so effectively, but fans need to know that Kerrigan basically remakes one of the games’ factions and rebuilds her own body and mind in the process.
Remember when Starcraft was a game about Raynor, Zeratul, Sarah and other very capable but flawed individuals who needed to often fight their own races to do what was right?
That’s all in the past and Heart of the Swarm re-creates the universe to be more about destruction, sometimes on an apocalyptic scale, that serves nothing but revenge, one of the most base emotions any creature can feel.
The developers try to be clever and make conversations between the Queen of Blades, her Zerg minions and their adversaries that apparently challenge preconceptions about violence, survival of the fittest and the meaning of revenge.
They create interesting interludes between missions, but they lack actual depth and cannot hide the power fantasy nature of the entire experience.
I sometimes felt like Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm was a first-person shooter masquerading as a real-time strategy, a game that is only concerned, in its single-player section, with empowering the player and allowing him to fulfill the story of the protagonist.
I have fond memories of replaying the first Starcraft and cannot shake the feeling that the series’ best moments are a thing of the past.