This campaign was intended to be a submission for the 2009 Campaign Creation’s campaign contest. Created by The Oracle, this campaign was never finished because he couldn’t comply with the contest deadline. RdeRenato recommended me to play this campaign a long time ago, now I have finally decided to play it.
Mission 1 - “I Stand Alone”: Cerebrate Slohr uses his never before seen magical powers to give a Hydralisk and a Zergling sentience (unfortunately, I’ve seen this before in another campaign). Any good commander would want his subordinates to be autonomous AND loyal. For no apparent reason, Slohr wants exclusiveness in regards to the intelligence of his own underlings, even after having killed his own Queens, even after knowing that Kerrigan is close of controlling all the Zerg in the galaxy, even when one of his primary objectives is to gain control of other Zerg… Before the initial events in this campaign, there was some sort of Zerg expedition to the outer space. I liked the idea of a Zerg expedition, although it’s not suitable for the StarCraft universe. Unless the Hydra Brood can count on infested ships or Protoss Warp Gates, it’s inefficient. It’s not the Zerg method of conquest. The Zerg expand like virus do, they infest what they have near, and then move further as they reproduce quickly. Even it can be seen in the UED Victory cinematic -how they start from Char, controlling all nearby planet while advancing towards the Earth-. The proposed idea would have worked better for an alternative storyline, not for the original storyline.
Center View was distracting, I prefer Pause Game for in-game dialogues because, although also interrupting the game, it provides some little time to relax a bit, especially if the map has intense macro (not this case). Pausing the game for dialogues shouldn’t be an issue, because it is supposed that the player is engaged with the story, provided the dialogues are relevant, but if they are not relevant for the story, then Pause Game is not necessary. If the story isn’t engaging, then the use of Pause Game is not the real issue. Center View, on the other hand, should be used for cutscenes, or an epilogue, or things like that. After been through Center View I had to move my screen back to where it was.
The final macro section should have been a separate map, because it is disconnected to all the previous events except for the surviving units (which are negligible for this macro section). That way it would not have been necessary to use Locations to prevent Overlords from going to the previous sections, and the player would be able to explore the map freely. There wasn’t too much to explore, but it is an important element of macro missions (finding resources, see what the enemy is doing), making them more fun to play (you get to know the surroundings, maybe find a surprise attack, etc.). I’m glad that I was able to use Ventral Sacs. The mission was a lot easier attacking buildings from the high ground. The AI was stuck and went crazy. The mineral node of the blue Protoss AI on the lower ground hindered units. I would have placed the resources near the walls to clear space and fix the pathing issues. Good thing that the map wasn’t protected, upon looking on the triggers I found that the Protoss Player has two Difficult AI’s, which could explain some dysfunctions.
The map was huge, but it was still claustrophobic.
Mission 2 - “Remains”: I really enjoyed the mini games, the boss battle, and the suspense created by the patrolling Ultralisks. The story becomes very interesting with its connections to Dark Vengeance.
Mission 3 - “Key to Victory”: The unlimited upgrades were exaggerated, I think up to level 4 or level 5 is enough for this mission. Poor Ulrezaj’s troops seemed made of paper against my units.
Truly slow paced mission. Mineral and gas extraction doesn’t add much to the gameplay, as there isn’t an AI, there are just enemy preplaced units. Instead of spawning Hatcheries, there should have been rescuable ones in replace of the Command Centers (in the previous mission it is mentioned that the Dominion was performing experiments on Kaloth’s Brood; although the Zerg are now on Braxis, maybe it could serve as a justification to preplace white Hatcheries?). Instead of having to slowly extract minerals and gas, there could be some powerups providing resources instead. Or simply add an enemy AI to make this a proper macro mission, something this campaign missed.
The ambience was cool. I thought I was playing Silent Hill, no kidding.
Overall this is a campaign that deserves to be finished. I didn’t like the initial approach on the story, but there’s a good story development later. Some mini games fused well to the story (for example finding the correct cave during the Protoss-Zerg battle), and other ones were more like stand alone side objectives unrelated to the story setting (e.g. the Pylons being spawned). All of them were fun, but obviously when designing a map the former are always preferable than the later.
I liked the voice acting for all the characters. The voice of the Protoss Commander sounded a bit Terran-like, but well voiced nevertheless, without exception.
Score: 7 out of 10.