The RTS world begins and ends with Blizzard’s StarCraft series. People love it so much that I don’t recall much in the way of complaining when Blizzard said that StarCraft II would come out in three parts focused on each of the three species in the game. It launched with Wings of Liberty in 2010. Last week, the first expansion pack for SC2 was launched. Did the critics think Heart of the Swarm lived up to the franchise?

Gaming Illustrated (91%): The graphics, cinematic and art style are all near-perfect. The voice acting, sound effects are also amazing, though do suffer from slight stuttering. The story is written and told brilliantly. The gameplay expands upon Wings of Liberty and fixes a lot of it’s shortcomings. Finally, the multiplayer redefines the RTS genre once again.

Edge (9/10): So Blizzard hasn’t quite pulled off the act of balancing StarCraft as an entity for all players, but that doesn’t meant that there isn’t something substantial here for everyone. For an expansion, HOTS is a dense package, adeptly fashioned and hugely enjoyable. But while its core game might be perfection, HOTS itself isn’t.

Calm Down Tom (8/10): If you are a fan of the StarCraft series or even if you only at times, take a tickling fancy for an RTS, I cannot recommend StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm highly enough. If you aren’t a fan of RTS or the series in general, there have been few times as good as this to get into it!

The Guardian (4/5): For RTS fans starved of major releases, PC fans increasingly abandoned for exclusive IPs and, of course, Starcraft fans in their millions, HotS is a massive slice of expertly crafted, beautifully balanced and totally tactical gameplay.

Quarter to Three (2/5): The campaign is poorly written, poorly acted, erratically paced, full of pointless upgrades and meaningless choices, crammed full of overproduced cutscenes that fail to relate to the gameplay, and without a shred of creative insight into how to use a real time strategy game to tell a story, much less how to get me to click “next mission” without heaving a tired sigh.