Starcraft II – Heroes Can Act, Can't Fight

Zeratul is quite a powerful character. He has a lot of shielding for a Protoss and two impressive abilities in Blink, which allows him to quickly get out of bad situation, and Void, designed to take down powerful units and detectors while the Dark Templar does his stealthy work. It's actually a pleasure to control him in the four mission mini campaign that is triggered somewhere near the middle of the Terran narrative. But Zeratul and the other named Protoss heroes you get to control in the final dream like showdown are just a sign that Blizzard could have done so much more with hero units in Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty but it chose not to.

The biggest offender is the mission where the objective is to steal a prototype weapon from the Dominion. The Odin looks like a mighty fighting machine, able to take on air and ground units, shoot massive artillery strikes and even deliver a nuclear weapon. It even has a super modern toilet system for the warrior who needs to be on the job for a long time. Yet Blizzard makes the choice to take agency away from the player by making the Odin an allied unit that goes around the map doing the heavy lifting in combat while the gamer needs to provide just some SCVs for repair duty and offer some air cover. It's a very nice mission but it would have been an awesome one if I got to guide that behemoth of destruction around myself.

Blizzard's choice is even more weird considering the fact that the Odin can be freely used in a later mission in the campaign, where the odds are so much against the player that you feel more of a need to baby sit the mech rather than using him to rain destruction upon the forces of the Dominion. I would very much have preferred to control the Odin in the first instance and have it as an ally in the second.

More character presence in the battles would also have added more personality to the game. Imagine Horner in a Wraith or Swann in a Siege Tank unit running around the battlefield. Sure, balancing would have been harder but in the end the game would have been richer.