For those who don't know, the second chapter in Blizzard's Starcraft II trilogy was recently released. It builds on the story of the previous game, focusing on (obviously) Kerrigan and her pet Zerg. I just finished playing through the campaign and was, overall, impressed. I'm sure you all know Starcraft, the gameplay, etc, so I'm not going to make this a real review, but I have three (ish) main observations to talk about.

1) First, the (somewhat) bad: Heart of the Swarm is much shorter than its predecessor. Wings of Liberty had you play through 26 full missions in one run. Heart of the Swarm technically has you play through 27, but 7 of those are "evolution" missions, which are little more than glorified unit demos and take perhaps 3 minutes apiece. Most of the regular missions take around 20 minutes on normal difficulty and focus heavily on showcasing your most recently acquired unit. Only the last 2-3 missions feel appropriately (overused word alert) epic in scale, and allow you to use your full army. On the plus side, there's a mission select feature that allows you to go back and replay old missions on your choice of difficulty with your full army. That helps, but it's still not really a substitute for a full selection of large missions. Oh, speaking of the difficulty, Heart of the Swarm is MUCH easier than WoL. If you've so much as used a computer before, you really need to play HotS on at least Hard, and perhaps Brutal. Normal isn't just "not a challenge," it's actually easy enough that you won't even enjoy yourself. Even if you're the sort who likes things on the easier side, just trust me when I say that Normal is a cakewalk.

2) The storytelling is fantastic. The plot is pretty much what you'd expect with no real surprises, but the cutscenes are amazing, there are a lot of them, and Kerrigan lives up to her reputation in a big way. Controlling a psychic demon-woman is so much more fun than a moping Texas marine, let me tell you. If the last game had you worried about Kerrigan's future, you can just stop that right now. She IS the game, and her story is absolutely the highlight of Heart of the Swarm.

3) Heart of the swarm has a level of unit customizability that wasn't found in the previous title, and it actually makes a big difference. There are three main things you can customize: Kerrigan's abilities, unit abilities, and unit. . .strain, I guess. Kerrigan has a rudimentary talent tree, of sorts. There are 6 levels, you have three choices per level, and you can choose different abilities for each mission with no penalty. The abilities range from direct attacks to economy modifiers to passive ability boosters. Units are much the same, except they only have three abilities to choose from. Unit strain is a choice of two, but you have to stick with your choice for the whole game. Anyway, these customizations aren't just window dressing, they really do affect how you play each mission, and what you can do. They add a lot to the game, and I'm looking forward to replaying some of the missions with different abilities selected. The only complaint I have is that there's really no way to choose your abilities intelligently, since you have no idea what sort of mission comes next. "Do you want zerglings that can jump up cliffs, or cheaper, faster zerglings?" "Uh...are there cliffs in the next level?" So, yeah. A little annoying to jump into the next mission and realize that you really would have liked to have that OTHER ability.

Aaaanyway, sorry for the wall of text, and I guess that's about all I have to talk about. I'm not really a multiplayer kind of guy, so I know there's a big hole in my info, but feel free to talk about that amongst yourselves in the comments.

Questions? Thoughts? Anyone else played through the campaign yet?