Look at Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm

I didn't review Starcraft 2 for two reasons, one is because I wasn't writing this blog when it came out and two because the review would have went like this: Starcraft 2 is an almost exact copy of the first starcraft game with better graphics (expected), a dumber story (expected) and almost no change at all because the game needs to be playable competitively by people who played Starcraft 1 for ages (also expected), I wouldn't have much more to say, you build SCVs, you gather minerals, you spawn marines and you shoot guys. Or you make zerglings, or you spawn more pylons. What about this new expansion then?

I think Blizzard is creatively bankrupt
And that's not true for 100% of the game but I have a really bad opinion on some parts of this RTS juggernaut. I won't comment on the story or on the scientist that's obviously a Mordin Solus ripoff, or on how predictable the story is, nor can I comment on the multiplayer, which I assume is almost identical to the original Starcraft 2, neither will I talk about how the story is cliched and ridiculous.

Nothing but the best

This is kinda Warcraft 3
Kerrigan is a Hero from Warcraft 3, she gets stat bonuses while leveling up, is stronger than most units, gets special abilities and you need her to accomplish most of the objectives when she's present. Maybe she's a bit too powerful, because there are a few missions here and there that I've beaten by defending my base with normal units and just destroying the opposition with Kerrigan alone. This breaks a little the RTS aspect of the game because then it plays like some bad action rpg and you get a message telling you that your base is under attack. My base was never defended well enough or built enough because all I needed was kerrigan and a handful of units.

Some of the upgrades had me raising an eyebrow too, most of Kerrigan's skills were classic tropes of the genre, attacks that hit multiple targets, having more HP and regeneration, being able to heal, jump on enemies, stun then... Then you get the weird base boosting skills, like Overlords spawning instantaneously and drones spawning in pairs, improved vespene extractors and the like... What does that have to do with Kerrigan? There's a whole section about upgrading your units, why not put these options there? Did they run out of ideas of things to add to Kerrigan?

It's like if Thrall had an ability to make Peons chop wood faster...

How I would fix this
Make Kerrigan either stronger or weaker. Making her weaker would mean that she's a unit (Like Jim Raynor often was) with better stats and some abilities, but not a skill tree and levels and things like that. Maybe you could keep everything and just lower her stats so she's better than everything you have, but not by a large margin and couldn't win in a 1v5 situation. Making her stronger would mean adding abilities that strenghten her instead of your base/army. Life draining on hit would work, being able to resist more damage would also be a nice ability, anything to improve her survivability a little would make her even more usable. That would change the way the game works even more, pushing more focus on how you use Kerrigan.

This is too much Diablo 3
Some parts of the game are just weird and toothgrindingly bad. I really don't want boss fights in my RTSes, and I want boss fights where you have to manually move your units around so they dodge attacks even less. Early on, there's a dropship boss that fires bombs in a line, then you fight three zerg bosses, one of which charges into walls (and there's a line to tell you where to dodge!) another boss breathes fire...

If I'm talking about a boss in a blizzard game that takes place in a huge C-shaped arena with the boss in the concave section of the C, that the boss has two main modes of attack, one of which is to slam his arms on the field with warning signs to help you dodge and that his other attack is a breath that he sweeps across the area, what does that make you think about?

Good guess.

Nope! It's some kind of zerg boss thing! You even get the life bar and the different attack patterns for the smash attack as the fight goes on! It's pretty terrible. At this point, I was ready to stop playing Heart of the Swarm because this is the same exact thing.

I wonder if there's a World of Warcraft boss like this

How I would fix this
Remove all of this boss fight nonsense. Bosses in Starcraft games have higher HP and attack and armor and maybe you have to defeat them on a timer and they might be able to bring reinforcements in or move around checkpoints and things like that but they're not dodge-based nor they should stay there, only showing warnings of where they're going to attack before slowly restarting their attack pattern. That's an action RPG thing, not a RTS thing, and it's lazy to use one in the other.

The actual real time strategy is okay even if it repeats too much
Otherwise, the changes they've made over the original Starcraft 2 are interesting. You get three choices of upgrade for your units with minor changes, such as attack speed, range, armor, and the like which you can always change between missions if you don't like what you've picked.

These upgrades are noticeable but in a minor way.

You also get maps where you experiment with two types of units (let's say, two kinds of zerglings) both of them with very different abilities, such as jumping around, slowing enemies on hit, splitting into two after exploding, burrowing and firing heavy attacks and other things like that. After you've completed the mission, you choose which evolution you take and the other is discarded.

The other kind of upgrade, makes a big difference but you can't roll them back.

And otherwise the gameplay is very similar to the old Starcraft 2 game and that's perfectly fine. However, I felt that this time around, there are way more missions with timers on them. You get new units almost each level but you don't have time to try them out because there's always something happening in five minutes that you have to stop and you just lose if it happens, one mission it's about doors closing, then gas, then nukes, then kerrigan dying for no good reason. I don't mind one or two missions with timers here and there, but not more than that, I don't like timers in my games in general.

Oh no Kerrigan is gonna die in 4 minutes or something!

How I would fix this

Well, remove some of the timed elements, add them to the optional parts of the levels or to achievements, but don't rush me, I want to build my base as big as I want and make 200 worth of mutalisks and then obliterate the enemies. Maybe removing some of the random attacks on your base, also (There's a strike squad coming to attack the hive cluster!!!) because if you give me a powerful unit to micromanage, I'm not going to care much about building defenses and spawning more overlords.