"Perfect Soldiers" is a 30-mission trilogy campaign consisting of 3 parts: Crimson Moon, Amber Sun and Aureolin Eclipse. The campaigns were not designed with sequels in mind, and yet sequels they acquired anyway, and now they're all gathered here together so that players can easily access them at the same place.
At the time of writing, this is an incomplete project. Crimson Moon and Amber Sun are done and ready to play, but Aureolin Eclipse needs its last missions finished. Those that are ready can be downloaded on this page.
http://www.sc2mapster.com/maps/perfect-soldiers/
Also, note that the project may be subject to alterations even after all the missions are done.
Though this is primarily a terran campaign, there are some missions in Aureolin Eclipse that let you play as protoss.
Story "Perfect Soldiers" has a dark, twisty story that's full of memorable scenes and moments, populated by characters that you will both care for and hate. The campaign begins at the intersection of two plotlines: a group of miners that have travelled to the remote world of Roverville in search for fortune, and a Crimson Moon assassin on the hunt for a dangerous terrorist threatening to bring chaos to the sector. As the story progresses, more and more characters enter... until the final showdown in Aureolin Eclipse's last mission.
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I just beat this trilogy today.
A month, or so, ago I beat the first of three chapters (Crimson Moon) and shared my thoughts. + Show Spoiler +On May 03 2016 03:26 The Bottle wrote: I finished Crimson Moon (the first part of Perfect Soldiers).
I liked the macro missions, especially the first one, where miners are evacuating, but there are some infested miners, and you have to kill hives quickly to identify which ones are infested and kill them, without killing any regular humans. I also really liked the defense mission, which was actually quite challenging; I had to start it over several times. (Getting set up in the beginning was more challenging than holding throughout, though.) There were only three macro missions out of ten, though. It was mostly micro missions controlling one unit, and some of them were BS. Especially one where you don't actually do anything except for walk around and have story revealed to you. Although two of them were about using the terrain as a puzzle to stealthily slip by a lot of obstacles, and they were interesting. Overall it was fun, but I hope the next chapters have more macro oriented missions.
The actual story though.... I know it's a little tricky to criticize these things, since they're more independent projects and the creator is actually more likely to see my post than, say, Blizzard. But I want to be straightforward about it because it did affect my enjoyment of the campaign, and it is considered one of the "attractions" of this campaign. I didn't like the story. It gets lauded as a great story a lot, but what I'm seeing is something that has the "elements" of a good story, without actually putting them together well. It goes into a lot of details on the characters' history, it has a lot of small talk dialogue that's meant to reveal the personality of the characters, etc (which is all good). But the dialogue was very awkward; it often felt like the writer used a thesaurus for the plain purpose of using big words in contexts where it fit weirdly and didn't sound like a real conversation. (Lines like "I will forego the truth".) It had an excessive amount of "the villain" meticulously explaining the plot to you, in an extremely contrived sense. That is, the sense that it's written more for us, the audience, than the actual character. And it relies heavily on shocking revelations (like, "GASP! You're not who you thought you were"). That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is bad when it's put as the central spotlight of the story, as a substitute for good writing. Especially when delivered to you in the aforementioned delivery method. Anyway, that's how I felt about the story. This is just one opinion, and I'm sure many others loved it. I still found the campaign to be fun overall.
I'll say this. I liked the story better than the train wrecks that I consider HotS and LotV to be.
I beat the second, and most of the third chapter, but then I went away from it for a month or so, and then I came back.
Anyway, I must say that the second and third chapters are much better! In terms of mission design, at least. The story still basically has the same issues that I griped about before. But there were a lot more macro missions, and they were pretty well designed too. Crimson Moon only had three macro missions, and the rest were micro missions (one of which was complete BS... you don't even do anything except walk around and reveal story). My favourite chapter though was the second one, Amber Sun. It had the best missions IMO, especially the ones where you play the dude who uses Raynor's sprite. And even the micro missions (which were thankfully rarer) were a lot better.
The second last mission of the last chapter would have been amazing, except that it has a game breaking bug. Essentially it punishes you for playing well and rewards you for playing badly. I kept on losing, not knowing why I was losing, until I realized the bug. So finally I decided to play it really badly and lazily, and I won. I don't know if this was fixed since I last downloaded it. There were a few other bugs in the campaign, but I think this was the only one that was game breaking. (Maybe the final boss in the second chapter had a similar bug, that caused him to nuke himself, making it too easy.)
Anyway, all in all I was really impressed with the mission design in the last two chapters, so GJ to the creator!
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