It's an awkward structural issue that Blizzard don't really know how to handle, although it does allow them to bookend the StarCraft II story by ending where it began. It also doesn't help that the game is focused on the Protoss, but then in the three-part finale to the game we suddenly get a major return from characters like Kerrigan and Raynor, during which the Protoss are shunted off to the side and don't get much resolution. It doesn't help that Amon is cut from the exact same cloth as Sargeras and the Burning Legion of WarCraft lore, an unknowable cosmic mega-foe who wants to kill everyone because why not? As an antagonist, he lacks the bite or personal edge that Arcturus Mengsk or Kerrigan herself had in previous games. Instead, the story is that the Protoss have to defeat Amon and don't know how to do that, so flit around from crisis to crisis until, inevitably, a plot twist reveals the Fallen One's hidden weakness, at which point you have to try to kill him in the face. The previous titles benefited from having a strong, personal through-line that helped anchor the massive battles and carnage around them: Wings of Liberty was focused on Jim Raynor's mission to redeem Kerrigan Heart of the Swam focused on Kerrigan seeking out vengeance on Arcturus Mengsk. It doesn't help that the game is very unfocused. Its characters are pompous and unrelatable, the dialogue is overwritten, cliched and awful and none of the characters with the sole exception of Alarak (helped by superb voice acting from John de Lancie) have much of a discernible personality. On the story front, Legacy of the Void is easily the weakest link in the StarCraft II saga. Its success in these fields is highly debatable. And it needs to see out the franchise - as any StarCraft III is likely many, many years away - in style. It needs to have exciting multiplayer that builds on the successful design established in the previous two games. The fact it's taken almost nine years since that announcement to get the game completely out is faintly ridiculous, and has certainly sapped some of the excitement and momentum from the franchise.īut the game is out now and has several roles to fill: it needs to be a satisfying single-player game with a strong storyline that ties up plot elements that begun eighteen years ago in the original StarCraft. The original StarCraft was released in 1998, its expansion Brood War a year later and StarCraft II was formally announced in the spring of 2007. It's taken a very, very long time to get here. Legacy of the Void is the third and final part of the StarCraft II saga, begun in Wings of Liberty (2010) and continued in Heart of the Swarm (2013).