An unknown unit turns up, an old ally learns a fresh trick, a new button suddenly appears on the UI. This is a sensation you'll revel in at carefully spaced moments slung throughout Heart of the Swarm's single-player campaign. It's the fact that this developer, above almost all others, knows when to give you so much power that you start to feel bad for the people you're up against. The hallmark of a Blizzard game isn't the art, the schoolyard pulpiness of the subject matter or even the depths of tinkering each project endures before it's finally presented to the public. As our single score attests, however, there's a unifying principle at work: an attempt to broaden the reach of strategy gaming without sacrificing its deeper pleasures. Part galactic soap opera and part chess match, part game and part sport, StarCraft 2 sounds like a potentially unwieldy beast. Then our multiplayer man Rich Stanton looks at the refinement and rebalancing of a genuine gaming phenomenon. First, Christian Donlan turns his attention to Heart of the Swarm's campaign, which shifts the storyline's focus from the Terran forces to a wronged Sarah Kerrigan, the former Queen of Blades, as she starts to rebuild the various wriggling broods of the Zerg. That's why we've chosen to examine each element separately - and with separate reviewers. Like Wings of Liberty, the foundation it builds upon, it's a real-time strategy game that has dared to pull its single-player and multiplayer components apart, balancing units differently for each mode and locking out dazzling solo toys when they'd unbalance competitive games.
StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm may be classed as an expansion, but it's also a couple of games in one.
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