RTS without S

User Rating: 6 | Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm PC
I am a veteran RTS player, and have been sad to see there are almost no new games in this genre anymore. So, I was happy to give this Starcraft 2 expansion a go.

Note that I am not into multiplayer gaming, so I will review this solely as a single player game experience.

I am not pleased to see how the game is moving further away from the strategy aspect and closer to being a pure action game. The game tries to cover up its lack of intelligence by stressing you out in many ways.

First of all, you are unable to zoom out the map to get a real overview of what is going on in the battlefield. This is really annoying when you are playing on a large 32 inch screen in 2560x1600 resolution like I am. You need to constantly scroll around like mad to be able to give orders and get a decent idea of what is going on. Sure, you can bookmark units and buildings and use keyboard shortcuts to move around, but it still is stressful.

Secondly, there is never enough time to plan or do anything in an intelligent way. Say you have 20 units you want to make into air and ground defense towers. You need to focus on each one in turn, select what you need to build, then where to build it. Then next one. Once you finish this procedure, you are probably already dead since the enemy has been destroying everything you did not have the time to take care of.

This makes the game a pure action game. The winner is the one who has memorized all the keyboard shortcuts and can give orders the fastest.

It would be easy to fix this by allowing the player to pause the game, then give orders in pace and quiet, then resume gameplay once all units knows what to do. This is a pretty common feature in good RTS games.

Too often I could not even find the unit I needed in the middle of a chaotic battle, to give crucial orders fast enough. And instead of being more generous to compensate for this problem, the game instead constantly presses you on time. A lot of the single player missions have time restraints on them. I feel it is a dumb way to make the game challenging, and cover up for the lack of a good AI.

I realize the game is designed as a multiplayer game, where balance and fairness is the main concern. For example, they do not want to give benefits to someone playing in an extreme resolution on a huge screen on a super fast computer, playing against some poor guy who plays on an old laptop. Likewise, a pause function would not work in a multiplayer scenario. and naturally, AI is not a concern in a multiplayer game either.

As a single player experience, the game is pretty disappointing in the strategy arena. But it does have its moment if you are more into an action game with a lot of cutscenes. That's not what I am looking for in an RTS though.