Starcraft HotS beta

Okay, you might have noticed the lack of a GoldenEye review yesterday. This wasn't a case of me being lazy all day, honest. It was a case of me spending the morning in the emergency room and then being lazy in the afternoon.

Apparently I'm fine, thank you very much.

Anyway I have about half an hour left in the movie to actually review, as well as screencaps to stick in... and I'm abusing my aunt's hospitality while my GoldenEye DVD sits back at my place. So I'm going to talk about HotS now, and maybe have the review up tonight.

First of all, I am by no means a professional player. Hell, the last level of the campaign on Normal gave me conniptions (and I recently re-played the campaign and tried to brute-force my way through the last level with nothing but Banshees... while playing at the "faster" speed. Whoops).  Secondly, I keep flipping back and forth between protoss and zerg, mainly because I only know one way to win as terran (mass Vikings and Banshees) and that gets old fast. 

So let's just jump in and complain about all the new units.

Terran

First off, the Medivac gets a speed boost so as to... give terran an advantage in combat drops, I guess. Now, this kind of makes sense because the zerg can Nydus and the protoss can warp. But both of those strategies involve buildings, and buildings are easy enough to kill if you, you know, pay attention. I always thought that the Nydus Worm and Warp Gate technologies were there to counter the terran ability to move their buildings and thus have less risky proxies.  (Of course, Warp Gate is basically what protoss get now instead of Recall from the first game, which was probably OP if I ever learned how to play the first game... I think the only hotkey I ever used in StarCraft was "A" for attack.)  Anyway, the devs said that it was hard coming up with new stuff for terran because they already have the coolest toys, soooo...

The Reaper is almost an entirely different monster now. They can still go up and down cliffs, but there's no speed boost upgrade and no anti-building grenades. And they regenerate health "outside of combat" which actually means "so long as they haven't been shot in the last five seconds." And they don't require a tech lab.  So basically now they're there for worker harassment as opposed to demolition, which makes the Hellions kind of pointless...

The Hellion can now transform into a Hellbat which does short-range splash damage. Good for blocking ramps, and guarding Siege Tanks and generally forcing your opponent to go air.

F*cking OP Hell God King Emperor Death N00bpwner Widow Mines are another means of forcing your opponent to immediately go air. Which is funny because as you can see, terran gets absolutely nothing to counter Mass Muta.  Except for F*cking OP Hell God King Emperor Death N00bpwner Widow Mines. For the price of a Baneling, terran gets a mine that homes, does splash damage, can target air units, and oh yeah doesn't freaking die once exploded. Oh, and you can unbury then and rebury them at will. Enemy players will need detectors and long-range units by the truckload. Why didn't terran just get the Perdition Flamethrowers from the WoL campaign? Heck, you could let them target air units and they still wouldn't be OP because they can't sodding move around the map. 

Protoss

Protoss now gets a Mothership Core, which functions exactly the same as a Mothership except is moves faster and doesn't cloak friendlies. The Recall ability now sucks (instead of Recalling all the units in a given area to where the Mothership is, it  takes the Mothership and all nearby units back to a Nexus), and instead of Vortex you now have Time Warp. The thing's available as soon as you have a Cyber, so you could take a map like Scrap Station, fly the Core over to the enemy base as soon as possible, and drop a Time Warp in the enemy mineral line. Boom you're ahead. Oh, and then it can stick a Cannon on your Nexus for a bit. So now Toss can Planetary Nexus rush.

The Oracle is basically gets a variation of the Parasite ability from the first game. It can also function as a detector or give itself a weak laser for a while. Haven't really figured out how to make it useful yet. Heck, the mineral disruption is really the only useful trick I've learned for the Mothership Core so far. However...

The Tempest is a flying siege tank.  That can target air units as well as ground units. So now Toss have two of the longest-ranged units in the game. Huzzah.

Zerg

Let's start with the good because there's a lot of ugly. First off, you can research Burrow and the Overlord speed upgrade without a Lair. Second, the Hydralisk speed upgrade from the first game is finally back.

Third, they have an awesome new caster called the Viper, which goes a long way towards countering enemy Siege Tanks and Colossi because it can either blind those units so they can't attack long-range, or drag those units right into the middle of the zergling swarm. Oh, and the Viper flies. So zerg have a flying caster again.

Which is a good thing because the Infestor's Fungal Growth ability got nerfed to hell. I probably shouldn't be complaining that much, because I only just learned how to use it effectively when I switched to HotS, but come on, I had only just learned how to use it effectively and then it got nerfed.

The zerg also have a unit called the Swarm Host which is effing useless because any competent enemy will have detectors in his army. The purpose is to give the zerg a siege unit, but, uh, we already have one. It's called the Brood Lord.