Preface - this is not about the story elements, they’ve been thoroughly discussed. From a gameplay technical perspective, the epilogue missions are a mess. It isn’t a problem that they’re too difficult or anything (I’ve done all campaigns on Brutal, I’m fine with challenge), it’s that they’re poorly designed. Replayed all the campaigns over the last few months for fun, and it became really glaring to me how bad the epilogue is compared to the rest.
To begin, all three missions suffer from several universal problems:
- Your campaign tech doesn’t carry over. I would normally not mind this, it may be a technical hurdle to link the three campaigns, except they already did it in Heart of the Swarm - conversations change depending on which of the branching mission paths you took. Clearly there is a mechanism in play to look at a previous campaign and take note of your gameplay choices, and this is the finale of the story, so being able to use our tech trees from past playthroughs would be a great enhancement to the gameplay. And even if not, fine, let us pick our tech before each mission instead of giving us pre-chosen ones, which forces us to use units and abilities we aren’t familiar with.
- Your allies are useless. Again, this normally wouldn’t bug me (it doesn’t in the normal campaigns), but in the epilogue, much ado is made of the three races working together to defeat Amon. Except in all three missions your put up a paltry defense, one or two static defense turrets and a half-dozen ground forces, and their attack waves consist of maybe a dozen tier 1 or tier 2 units. As much as the epilogue makes a big deal of the three races working together, in every mission you’ll be doing all the heavy lifting and your allies will just get in the way.
- The visual design is bad. The Void is black and red, the energy around the area is black and red, Amon’s forces are black and red. The entire epilogue is an eyesore, there is nothing interesting or distinct about any of it, you’re fighting globs of dark red that you often can’t see through the void energy effects. Then in the final mission, you’re fighting endless waves of black rocks, occasionally with a different color effect than red! It’s boring and lifeless.
- The technical aspects are sloppy. Carrying over from the last point, these missions feel unfinished. Healer units do not automatically heal allies, your healers ignore the AI’s and the AI’s ignore you. You can’t build on allied creep, which is a HUGE problem in the second mission in particular since you can’t reinforce Zagara’s position. These errors aren’t in Co-op missions or even in the rest of the campaign (it’s a mechanic in Brothers in Arms that you can rescue Dominion healers to support your forces!)
4.5. The Terran mission gets special mention. The second mission has a host of problems that are not only not in the other campaigns, but also not even in the other epilogue missions. Units have abilities from melee play they didn’t in the campaign - Marauder Stimpacks, Medivac Afterburners, Battlecruiser Tactical Jump, Thor’s High-Impact Payload. Now, I’d honestly be fine with this, its been three years in-universe and the Dominion may have upgraded their forces. Except they have these abilities alongside campaign-exclusive ones like Orbital Depots, Banshee and Viking AoE damage, and Goliath range increase. Plus, the mercenary variants you can hire don’t have these abilities. I’d particular like to call attention to the Reaper, who can use D8 Charge to deal 30 damage to enemy and friendly units in an area of effect, an ability it has NEVER had in ANY game mode! No really, their bombs in WoL, Co-op, and Melee, all work differently than they do in this one mission. In fact, from what the SCWiki lists, this ability is from the beta! This mission ought to be as simple as utilizing the same units from either WoL, but instead we got a mash-up of campaign, melee, and development skills. How did this happen when neither the first nor third missions do this? It’s not like Kerrigan can morph Ravagers. - The final mission sucks. Again, not a matter of difficulty, its just bad. In addition to the problems above, you’re the Zerg fighting against an enemy force that never runs out of resources, has infinite supply, is a mixture of all three races, are supported by high-HP constructs with powerful area damage abilities and auras, and your objective targets regenerate HP at a high rate. The Zerg’s primary racial trait is that they are the Swarm, they overwhelm enemies with sheer numbers. Missions in HotS played to that, but not this one, you can’t overwhelm Amon’s Void armies. The first mission let you play like a Protoss, the second mission let you play like a Terran, but the third mission doesn’t let you play like a Zerg. Between the massive HP pools of endlessly respawning constructs, endlessly respawning enemies, and heavy damage output of enemies, you have to rely on hit-and-run tactics with Mutalisks (Blizzard knows this, they made the 10th anniversary achievement for this mission to win without building a Spire). In theory, Kerrigan should be able to support her army against such opposition, but in practice she’s a glorified medic. Her abilities are all taken from the end of HotS, just a bit stronger now. Oh, and she can teleport, but only to areas with creep. We’ve commanded the Odin, Talandar, Brutalisks, the Hyperion, the Shield of Aiur, Leviathans, and all of them felt like they brought major firepower to the frontlines. Kerrigan pales in comparison to all of them, she has to rely on spamming her self-heal ability to stay alive and can’t use her abilities freely because of her meagre 100 energy cap. She’s supposed to be Xel’naga, comparable to a god, and a single attack wave can overwhelm her and kill her in a few seconds. It’s sad.
tl;dr the epilogue campaign is remarkably unpolished compared to the main three campaigns. There’s a lot of bad design choices, sloppy programming, and half-baked mechanics, it feels fan-made compared to the other campaigns, like a different team made them on a shoestring budget and a tight deadline that didn’t allow for playtesting and bugfixing. And aside from Blizzard being a shell of its former self, the fact they gave us 10th anniversary achievements, but did nothing to improve these problems, really does leave the Starcraft saga ending on a whimper instead of a bang.