Starcraft

"Excellent game with some small problems."

The last few years of Real-Time Strategy (RTS) gaming has seen a plethora of new titles and ideas come to the table. Many of these have faded out some have stayed, but most have run their course. Standing out among them is perhaps one of the most popular RTS games created to date. Starcraft, developed by Blizzard, has become the center of a cult following of gamers and remains very popular even after so many years after it was released, back in 1998.

Starcraft had a good deal of inspiration from its predecessors such as Command and Conquer and the Warcraft games but fans of RTS games will find that it does a much better job of going by the standard RTS formula. What you will find in Starcraft are three major campaigns for you to play through. You will start out with the "space-junky" type Terrans who construct mechanical buildings and units to face their foes. Moving on to the next campaign you will control a race called the Zerg that completely rely on biological means to produce buildings and their armies. In the last campaign there will be a stark contrast to the previous two where you will find a race of super-intelligent and advanced robots called the Protoss. They seem rather mystical and philosophical compared to the other races and focus mainly on protecting their homeworld of Auir and the brotherhood of Protoss that live there. This adds a good layer of depth that is not often seen in games like this.

When you are actually in the campaigns you will often find yourself completing stereotypical build, seek, destroy missions where all you have to do is build up a group of units and raid the enemies scattered throughout the map. However there are a few missions that involve trekking through an enemy infested area with only a few units that you must utilize efficiently and with strategy in mind.

If you are concerned that this game is just gameplay and nothing else then you will be happy to know that Starcraft features a story that surpasses that of most other RTS games, if not all of them. It will be hard to reveal anything of the story without spoiling it so I will leave it up to you to find out what it is about.

The other aspect of single player allows the player to go head to head in a custom game against the computer. The player can select the game type, map, races, and number of computer controlled opponents in any match. The only downside to this is that the computer seems to know exactly what you are doing and frequently will perform one of the multiplayer strategies that is known as rushing. Which basically involves building a few destructive units very quickly at the start of the map and then rushing them to your base to wreak havoc on your collecting units.

In the multiplayer aspect of the game you will find a very nice setup that allows you to compete in a variety of game types with up to eight opponents or allies at a time. Players can easily join a game that they like because of the sheer amount of people that are playing online nowadays. Don't have a particular map? Don't worry. As soon as you join a game you can download the current map quickly without fuss. Starcraft also keeps track of all wins, losses, draws, and dissconnects and keeps track of them with via the Battle.net online server that all the games play on.

Sadly, though, multiplayer has a good deal of problems. One of the most commonly used tactics is "rushing" which was mentioned earlier in this review. All you have to do to win a game quickly is build a few units and send them to your opponents base and annihilate him before he has a chance to build anything. Some matches finish in about five minutes due to this strategy, sometimes it takes less than that. Almost everybody uses this and it takes away from the strategy aspect of the game as well as the fun.

There are also some matches where all you do is build up units at your base until you exceed your supply limit and then attack at the center of the map until one of you emerges victorious. Fun as it is, it seriously lags the game out when you do this. An eight-way free for all usually results in a few players getting kicked due to lag issues and dissconnects.

Sometimes a player will completely swarm an opponent with units and the match simply becomes a battle of numbers, which is also the case with the above paragraph.

The basic online motto is essentially: Do unto others as they would do unto you, but do it first.

The only implemented safeguards in the game (against this type of thing) are that you can only select and control 12 units at a time. This makes it harder to perform a rush but anybody who can master pressing his quick-assign keys in quick succession along with some well placed mouse clicks can easily overcome this. Aside from the selecting limit the only safeguard against rushes is you can build 200 units or the equivalent. That may or may not seem like a lot depending upon your background but even with the unit limit there are still some considerable buildups of units.

There are only a few very small glitches here and there so your gameplay is never hindered by the like. Your major problems will be with your opponents.

On the technical scale Starcraft really isn't anything impressive. The graphics are pretty good but nothing special, the map textures and assorted terrains look pretty good but they certainly could be better. The only superb example of graphic achievement in this game is during a few rare movie sequences that take place in-between and after some of the campaigns. The graphics in those small sequences blows away quite a few games that are coming out even nowadays.

Almost everything in this game falls under the "good but not great" category. They are all good but they could be improved upon in one way or another. Perhaps the only thing that is exemplary in Starcraft is the unit and building animations. They are all done realistically and most impressively.

All the dialogue in the game is spoken out loud by voice actors. More or less they sound good but there are a few characters and sequences that sound a bit off, to say the least.

Hardcore fans fo the game can even download a map and campaign editor that allows you to create and experiment with your own maps. You can add in your own triggered events and spoken dialogues if one is willing to go into it that far.

All in all, Starcraft is an excellent game with some small problems that need to be ironed out. If you are willing to spend some time to learn the ins and outs of this game you will probably find yourself having a blast with this game no matter what your gaming preferences are.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 06/03/04