LEGACY OF THE VOID CAMPAIGN UPGRADES SERIES

It's very good at sending absurd waves of enemies at you, convincing you that the situation is unwinnable, in order that you then feel like the champion of champions when you do, in fact, win. We're a long, long way from the routine military ops of the original StarCraft and deep into some ongoing intergalactic apocalypse, so there's almost always some race against time element, and some giant doohickey that needs to be defended or destroyed. Blizzard have very much mastered the indefinite crescendo, each challenge feeling even more impossibly climactic than the last. Legacy of the Void works hard to make each level distinct from the last, and indeed to make each an escalation upon the last one. And they're pretty good stuff, if by now fairly familiar. Time to talk about the real-time strategy missions that are squeezed inside the inanity. In the grim darkness of twenty-first century blockbuster videogaming, there is only lore.ДЄnd breathe. Everything but made-up words and hollow bombast has been scoured away. It's a formula that has worked many times for Blizzard before, but Legacy of the Void is that formula at its most depressing, its most inhuman. This is laser-targeted, mathematically-calculated offal, meeting the believed needs of an audience obsessed with lore above all else. Nothing in it is an accident nothing is the result of laziness or inability. This is them being as big as they can be. And yet they have, as always, clearly spent an absolute shit-ton of money on cinematics and setpiece levels. I'd be highly tempted to say that this was Blizzard on cruise control, including a token singleplayer effort for a package only really intended for its multiplayer mode. It's not simply tedious: it's openly humiliating that one of the biggest game-makers in the world believe that all we want is this.

It's the kind of videogame storytelling that would cause someone who doesn't play videogames to decide, should they walk in on me playing it, that this really is the lowest common denominator of art forms. Rest assured it reaches a definite conclusion, but the vast bulk of it is so cloyingly dour, so entirely devoid of wit, warmth or humanity. It was a genuine relief when StarCraft old hands Kerrigan and Raynor made their appearances, no matter how contrived or redundant after the events of earlier chapters, because at least they and their doomed, chaste courtship represent something human, something beyond technobabble incarnate. I'm not even sure I can tell you anyone's names: they are all the same person with a different skin. Nobody in the Protoss cast makes an individual impression. Even the overblown pulp and soap operatic pomp of the last two instalments is lost in favour of a relentless tidal wave of bone-dry exposition and techno-babble. This is a tale without anyone or anything to anchor to unless you're really, really into cement-faced aliens who sound like they've never smiled in their lives and are for some reason trying out for a part at the Renaissance fair. Or, for that matter, characteristics beyond 'very serious'. Great, OK, they want to save their race from a returned dark god who wants to do that thing that returned dark gods always want to do, but they don't have any personal stakes. None have anyone they care about, or mourn for, or hope for.

LEGACY OF THE VOID CAMPAIGN UPGRADES SERIES

This third and ostensibly final part of the StarCraft II series has already been wrong-footed by its two predecessors wrapping up the bulk of the storyline, making it all the more bewildering that it doesn't even try to imbue its cast of mouthless Protoss techno-aliens (whose goal is overcome some evil deity who's trying to crossbreed them with Zerg and then destroy the universe or something) with any semblance of a personality.Д®very one of them speaks robotically faux-biblical lines like 'and in that treasonous instant, Adun ushered the heretics and himself unto fate', like a whole cast of entirely humourless Thors. Those personalities are hilariously broad - hard-bitten space cowboy with a heart of gold, vengeful death-queen, snooty evil emperor - but at least you knew who they were, and what they cared about. The StarCraft II series before Legacy of the Void wouldn't win any storytelling awards in a sane universe, but at least it tried to give its main cast personalities. In fact, it does the exact opposite of that. When your entire cast consists of people who don't have mouths or pupils, you need to do your damnedest to ensure their words carry the emotion their faces cannot. I'm not much of a one for StarCraft II multiplayer, but I wanted to see the singleplayer tale through to its conclusion and, heck, I do miss traditional real-time-strategy, so I took a belated look at the campaign mode. StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void is the second expansion for StarCraft II, this time focused on mystical, mouthless, paladin-like alien race the Protoss.

Legacy of the void campaign upgrades