Did a full playthrough of all campaign missions for sc2 in the last week or two, including epilogue and prologues. I did them on hard the first time and haven’t replayed them since. I’ve had a good history in 1/1 coop (diamond, can do brutal 6+ with a good partner /can solo brutal +) so it wasn’t necessarily for the challenge
It became apparent throughout how much the quality of the game (story and gameplay) deteriorated as the expansions came into play
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WoL was great, had challenging missions, a good story and side characters that you actually cared about (tosh, dr. hasly ) For most missions, you had to think about your tactics and unit comp and it wasn’t just lets mass till 150 supply then roll everyone. The macro sense of terran felt a bit dull at times as most missions you’d be building scvs non stop (it gets slightly easier once you get refineraryies and orbital commands)
Also the tech decisions you had to make had significant trade offs and were permanent so you had to think ahead of what would be best suited for the missions ahead. I throughly enjoyed the story, gameplay, it felt challenging at times and rewarding. Especially the last mission, no matter what preparations you made, the last 3-5 minutes was always a harrowing finish.
Overall Wol was a great campaign, 9/10 im my book.
then came hots, First it was slightly shorter in terms of number of missions, but half the missions it felt were tutorials or dungeon crawler type maps that took less than 10 minutes to complete so a full play through felt a lot less satisfying.
And the story its self was a big meh, yes Kerri is out for revenge, but the drastic change of her character throughout seemed out of line from someone who in the first mission was “thats why you don’t try and control the zerg”… 3 missions later she is killing terran on char… And the story transitions between missions was trash, boring garbage. Literally ever single (non rendered ) cut scene was kerri walking through a door in the levi, speaks with nidaria or zagara, blah blah blah, …–> invade new planet.
the side characters were not compelling and boring (xcept stukov, hes my comrade)
Also the difficulty was… very easy. once kerri gets rolling and leveling, she becomes a early game powerhouse, easily clearing your expo and the first or second obj. Also due to zerg macro mechanics, it was easy to max out at 200 by like 13-14 min on most maps. The one interesting thing was the permanent evolutions that could drastically change your play style or give you a new comp to play around with (like cropser roaches, or combining both zerglings and jumping banelings ).
Overall, I think the customization of kerri/army was the highlight of the gameplay, but the decisions were not as binary or permanent as those in wol, so kind of a mute point.
Also, unlike wol, the ending missions were a complete cakewalk, I believe I full cleared the last one (every single thing dead on map) in about 18 minutes with roach/hydra.
Overall impression, 5/10. Enjoyable at times but cut off at the knees due to too easy gameplay, boring character development and an overall meh story arc.
Now onto lotv, which took my less than 2 sitdowns to beat (id say probably less than 5 hours total, including time spent watching cutsences, customizing the to Soa or my solider assignments.
Again the mission count was less than wol but the difficulty of the missions made some a cake walk and others slightly annoying.
First off, the prologue mission difficulty (of the first two) was a significant step up compared to the others. Both the first and second mission require good unit control, good resource management and aggressive timelines to adhead to. I was pleasantly surprised at the challenge of the prologue and was looking forward to the rest of the missions.
Later on, it became apparent that the campaign was not as good. The permanent choices were gone, everything was adjustable kind of took something away from it. Also the value of one unit assignment compared to the others was very imbalanced for certain units (do you want to have carriers, tempests, or … a mothership-- carriers were clearly better, same with void rays vs destroyer rays vs arbiters, vrays clearly better)
As you play through it, the macro becomes fustrating with how slow probes build and the time it takes for a nexus to build. Once you get chrono wave, probing becomes easier. The extra abilities that you gain from Soa make objectives a lot more trivial, as abilities like solar lance, time stop make entire screens worth of enemy units irrelevant or a burning mess. Overall, I thought the soa aspect was harder to abuse than kerrigan and it did add a layer of resource management. My issue was how stale the optimal unit comps became once you reach certain power spikes when you realize zealot/immortal/archon > all or gain access to vrays.
It was sad once I realized how easy the last half of the campaign got once I resigned myself to only buildling vrays or carriers. I would build other army comps but the missions would take a bit longer because of how trash gateway units are. People on the ladder always discuss or joke about how trash gateway units are (which is half of your ground army) and that protoss relies on power units to win. Well it became apparent early on in the campaign how cost inefficient gateway units are and how they melt to most enemys.
It felt Like i had to sit back longer in my base and max out before moving out, In the other campaigns, I would move out and be aggressive with my units from start to finish, with good mirco to prevent losses, constantly reenforcing or parade pushing. IN lotv, I felt that I had to sit back till 8-10 minutes to mass an army of t2-t3 units so that i wouldnt be stuck going back and forth trying to build up again. Unsupported gateway units are trash and It really made the campaign less fun with the reliance on power units (particuallry the void ray, once unlocked, there was no other reason to build anything else). This is sad, because one of the reason I main protoss in 1v1 is that they are fun to control/micro in all stages of the 1v1 game (early game stalker pusher, oracle control, immo/sentry micro, late game storm/feed back/repoistion stalkers to hit viking etc ect etc). By making toss air, like the vray, so strong in the campaign, it felt like an a move game half the time.
The story of lotv felt disjointed at times, the mission chronological order was weird during playthrough and it felt like you were being jumped around the sector for very little reason. The whole story about the khala being infected by amon, turning/controlling protoss i thought was a cool aspect but the steps that the good guys took in the final missions became irrelevant because, well amon awoke anyway. also, zera dying needlessly felt a little tacted on, for emotional relevance. The main lotv campaign’s story I thought was slightly better than hots but it wasn’t anything special, had poor side character development (beside alarak, hes my boi) and felt like it lacked emotional gravity or consequences
The one plesantly redeeming aspect of the lotv campaigns was the epilogue. i feel like those three missions each were a challenge on brutal and required a committment to a strategy and early game resource management was super important. The first two, were a tough but not unbeatable challenge ( I really enjoyed the expo hoping in the first one). And the last one felt like a rush to play, with limited time/resources yet a s*%3 load of enemies to deal with. unfortunately it can be beaten easily by only building mutas.
the epilogue missions were great, and I felt were my favorite ones out of all 3 campaigns. I even thought the ending of the story was nice, and but a nice bow on everything. I’m a sucker for happy endings but I was satisfied with the end of sc2 story.
For LOTV overall without the epilogue would be 6/10, but with those last three id say 7. I like protoss and it was fun, but the ease of the campaign, combined with boring choices, linear story and overpowered ness of toss air detracted from it.
Just my 2 (maybe 200) cents after spending a lot of time playing the campaign recently.
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