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Editor's note: Given StarCraft 2's split between single-player and multiplayer - and the different demands made by both modes - we're splitting our impressions, leading with this piece by Paul Dean on the campaign. We'll be following up with a feature on the multiplayer in the near future.We should all be bored of this by now. We should be bored of dragging cursors across great twitching throngs of identical units. We should be bored of fixed isometric perspectives. We should be bored of constructing additional pylons. We've been doing this sort of thing for two decades (think about that, two decades) and perhaps, in the hands of another developer, it would now be boring. But it's to Blizzard's credit that Legacy of the Void is able to take what is one of real-time strategy's most traditional formulas and still find ways to tweak its inputs to produce satisfying, engaging and even outright exciting results. Legacy of the Void builds Starcraft's ridiculously overwrought story to a grand and melodramatic climax, doing so while still managing to somehow, somehow teach their old dog some new tricks.
Legacy of the Void is also ridiculous. It's absolutely bursting with plot, plot all the time. Constant, inescapable plot. Cutscene after cutscene, dialogue after dialogue shows keeps you up to date with every beat in the the story of the noble Protoss and their battle again the really quite trendily-dressed black-and-red forces of the Big Bad Amon. Blizzard's extremely fancy cinematics, impressive and dynamic, are all explosions or revelations or epiphanies, with wall to ceiling bad dialogue ("Much has changed since your era!" "No! It cannot be!") and an almost constant raising of the stakes.
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