Well, my choice of new game recently came down to Bioshock Infinite vs SCII: HotS. Since HotS was $20 cheaper and no game has ever been worth $60, it wasn't a hard choice. I have a feeling Bioshock is the superior experience, but it's still not worth the money.

I finished HotS' campaign today. I enjoyed it. What I liked most was that it featured actual MISSIONS with some interesting twists, rather than just "multiplayer against AI with objectives" repetetiveness. Which was something Wings of Liberty managed, too. But felt like HotS did a better job of giving me the standard SCII tools while tasking me with interesting enough objectives (often fairly cleverly juggled against each other) and specialized tools to achieve them that I never felt like I was "just" playing a custom game vs AI.

There was a variety of hero units on the battlefield who, when used well, meant it was less about building Roach/Hydra and more about using the heros to buff the army you need NOW. It made things a little more dynamic. The addition of Evolutions and the ability to choose (and change between missions) one of three special mutations for each major Zerg strain also kept things interesting. It meant things felt a little different and you could also (in theory) customize your swarm for the mission at hand. I say "in theory" because it's hard to prepare for a mission you're not familiar with.

The story is a bit silly, with the occasional drama flying high above the rest of the standard sci-fi tropes and making things feel even more silly. The cinematics were impressive, but I was even more impressed with the in-game cutscenes, which used high-quality models and looked better than pre-rendered cutscenes from many other games.

One HUGE complaint I have is that the game STREAMS MISSION DATA rather than storing it locally. Which is asinine. Hard drives these days are enormous. But not everyone will always have a GOOD data connection. Even with my "50Mbps" connection I often sat around for a few minutes waiting for a mission to load. So backward it's brainmelting. Just let me install the s***. Or have it operate intelligently and see that I have dozens of gigabytes of space free (of my 2TB) and just install it--but then let people with low hard drive space stream it.

I haven't played ANY multiplayer yet, either vs AI or people. Since units behave so vastly differently in singleplayer, I figured my brain would handle singleplayer better if I wasn't expecting "normal" behavior from things. I almost lost an early mission because I didn't realize that Swarm Hosts don't BURROW in singleplayer, and thus can still be seen when rooted. And that was WITHOUT playing any multiplayer.

I was also kind of disappointed with some of the unit designs. Aberrations, particularly, are incredibly bland-looking by Zerg standards. They look like placeholder art. I don't really like them at all (visually...practically they're quite nice as they're a tier 1 monstrosity). I also think the new Lurkers look a little fisher-price and cartoony compared to the original. It's not just the team colors (purple in singleplayer) but also the combination of bulk and lack of fine detail in the model.

I also thought the ending was a bit meh. Yeah, it established what I expected it to, but it did so in a soap-opera drama way rather than being interesting. And it was, of course, yet another cliffhanger.

Story-wise, I'm certainly glad they're saving the Protoss expansion for last. I've always been a 'Toss fan and I can see this next game being REALLY good. But I was disappointed that there were no Protoss missions scattered amongst the Zerg missions in the same way we saw Zerg and Toss missions in the Terran stuff.