Starcraft II: Heart of The Swarm Campaign Details

I’ve been playing a lot of Starcraft II over the past few weeks. My backlog continues to grow (with Steam sales practically forcing me to buy the entire Sam and Max collection), but I find myself putting other games off to just play one more match. Giant Bomb isn’t helping with its recent preview of Starcarft II: Heart of the Swarm.

The expansion’s story continues on from Wings of Liberty where *spoiler* happens to *spoiler*, with the focus being on Kerrigan and the zerg this time round. The structure of the campaign will be familiar to players of this previous game as far as the mission select and upgrade system.

Rather than researching technology, the zerg like to evolve to upgrade. Standard speed and armour upgrades are included, but there are more interesting choices. Giving zerlings a chance to spawn broodlings when they die, or turning banelings into gorgelings, which turn killed enemies into collectable resources, to name a couple.

Kerringan will play a central role in the campaign, as she will be a playable hero unit in most of the game’s 20 missions. She can’t be killed and just burrows and reappears at your base.

Between missions, Kerrigan can gain new abilities and upgrades, which are split into “battle focuses”. The focuses previewed were Spec Ops and Corruption. The Spec Ops abilities were energy stun based effects and skills such as giving a boost to max energy. Whereas the Corruption focus is more zerg-like with the ability to explode a small unit into broodlings, or cast a poison cloud.

There is a possibility of the new units and upgrades from Heart of the Swarm’s campaign and some of the campaign units from Wings of Liberty appearing in the multiplayer side of the game. Blizzard has only confirmed that new units and maps will be available at the moment. Not particularly surprising, as there are a lot of elements likely to change when balance testing begins.

No release date for Heart of the Swarm as of yet, it will be done when it’s done. Hopefully soon.