Yeeeeeeeeeah.
So.
The first thing to say is that unlike Wings of Liberty, where yeah you could upgrade the various units and make them kind of OP, the whole point of the single-player campaign in Heart of the Swarm seems to be "get these ridiculous upgrades and then point them at the enemy and steamroll his entire army."
Now, I like to think I'm slightly better with the Zerg than I am with the other two races... but when Roaches, Banelings, and Kerrigan herself can all spawn extra units, and Zerglings respawn at no extra cost, basically all you have to do is point them in the right direction and watch madness happen.
Sour about that Hydra speed upgrade, though.
So I've been playing the game on Hard, and have had two missions now (the Chrysalis one and the Harry Potter one) where at the end I just gave up on defending my base and let the clock run out. Then there was another mission (the one where you go around gathering all the eggs) where I broke the system by just walking straight into the enemy base with a giant army. Uh, what I'm saying is that the difficulty curve is epically skewed.
Alternatively, that there's no clear indication of what order to do the missions in. See, the first two levels that were available were Ice-world and Char, and I did Ice-world because Roaches and Hydras are more important to me than Banelings and Aberrations. And once Ice-world was done, Zerus opened up, so I did Zerus. So yeah I reinfested Kerrigan like six missions into the game. But that last mission on Zerus was too tough for me (because again I'm not actually all that good at this game, or at least at Zerg micro), so I had to take the difficulty down to Normal. Then I went to Char, where the very next mission was the one where I steamrolled straight into the enemy base (on Hard).
I had this problem with the original Mass Effect too. As soon as I got control of the Normandy, my brain said "Noveria = novice. Go there." And what followed was about five hours of acidic death and frustration.
Now, I prefer games that give you multiple missions to go on at once. That way if one challenge is too difficult, you can go do something else for a while, hone your skills, level up, and come back. I'm not complaining about that. I'd just like some indication as to the level of difficulty I'm about to face. (Not that going to Zerus later would have helped, since you don't get to pick Kerrigan's abilities for that mission, nor do you get your specially mutated units.)
What about the story? Well the beginning is overly sappy. Just as Dumas laid the injustices on thick and heavy in The Count of Monte Cristo to justify Edmond's epic revenge scheme, here Blizzard lays on the romance so that when (it looks like) Raynor dies, Kerrigan has this whole epic revenge arc to go through. It took me a little while to warm up to this approach, but I do like the notion that Kerrigan reluctantly becomes the Queen of Blades again. Or the Primal Queen. Or whatever she's calling herself now. The scene on the shuttle where the Zergling comes in and she realizes that it's the only way to get revenge is perfect. It's just...
Everything in the trailers suggested that Kerrigan was pissed to be human again, that she was going to break out of the facility Raynor and Valerian stuck her in, that she was going to beat up Raynor (and not a shapeshifter that looked like him... though I did like it when Duran took the form of Ghost-Kerrigan and they impaled each other. No idea if that mission's available before Kerrigan reinfests herself... but because Char's available right from the get-go, they had to have done some cutscenes twice, once with Zerglock Kerrigan and one with Primal Queen Kerrigan.
Which reminds me: I really appreciate the fact that more than four cutscenes are fully rendered. That was a nice improvement. I finally got to see what Horner looks like in ultra-quality graphics, for example.
Oh, and I'm pissed that Warfield died. What does Blizzard have against my favorite tertiary characters?
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