StarCraft II, like most members of the RTS genre, is actually two very different games in one. There’s the highly competitive multiplayer mode in which people compete for the highest spot on the ladder and, in larger tournaments, for thousands of dollars, and there’s the single-player mode which tells the occasionally incomprehensible yet usually entertaining story of the Koprulu Sector. The Legacy of the Void prologue is all about the single-player side of things, comprising three missions from the beginning of the third and final installment of the StarCraft II. Overall the missions are mostly par for the course. Which is to say, they’re pretty good.
Nothing really revolutionary happens in the first three missions – it is just a prologue, after all – but Blizzard’s finesse with the familiar yet infinitely interchangeable pieces of its universe is on full display. The main thrust of the prologue has to do with the corrupting influence of the “hybrids,” demon-like amalgamations of Zerg and Protoss who have made a few appearances here and there in the StarCraft II story so far. Now there is more intermixing of the factions, such as enemy Terran units that can warp in around a pylon like Protoss. The prologue follows Zeratul as he travels Jedi-like in his tiny starship on a mission to uncover more about the hybrids and, as usual, the fate of the galaxy hangs in the balance.
The missions themselves are fairly standard fare. If you’ve played StarCraft II before, or even if you’ve played any RTS with a halfway decent storyline, you’ll recognize both the straightforward “build a bunch of units and kill everything” as well as the more tactical “control just a few units and infiltrate the map” types of missions. None of them really break the StarCraft mold (considering the popularity of that particular mold this is probably good), but there are a few twists such as a map with no vespene geysers that instead has random pockets of collectable gas resources that pop up sporadically in various locations around the map.
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“…the three missions with Zeratul feel more like a tease than anything, but not necessarily in a bad way.”
And aside from a few side missions in the other two campaigns this is the first time we really get to control Protoss units on a large scale in single-player. In the previous installments the single-player units themselves have deviated significantly from the more highly-balanced multiplayer ones, and the same stands to be true for Legacy of the Void. More complicated tech trees have appeared in both previous campaigns, which included entire classes of units not available in multiplayer (some of which are completely busted and very powerful). Combined with more of the hybridization seen briefly in the prologue, the Protoss campaign could be very complex and interesting and very cool.
Perhaps more so than most intro missions for previous StarCraft II campaigns, and perhaps because access to this prologue is being used as a reward for preordering, the three missions with Zeratul feel more like a tease than anything, but not necessarily in a bad way. Usually after finishing the prologue you would, well, play the rest of the campaign. But now we have to wait to find out what happens to our mouthless hero and what happens to the universe and what cool things we get to blow up. In some ways that’s good, because it means that there’s something to look forward to. But it also feels a little like you finally got to play the next Starcraft campaign but just as soon as you started getting into it they took it away again. As Zeratul would probably not say: “patience, young padawan.”
