.com
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This add-on for Starcraft expands your playing world with new
story lines, weapons, worlds, and music. The game begins as
Terran Emperor Mengsk I, having achieved his goal of total power
over the human colonies, must now turn his attention to both the
rising power of the woman he betrayed--Kerrigan, the infamous
Zerg Queen of Blades--and a conspiracy deep within his own ranks.
You must have a complete version of Starcraft for this product to
function.
Review
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Expectations tend not to run high for add-ons and expansion
packs; they're poor-man's sequels, usually thrown together in the
wake of the original game's success. But you figure that so long
as the expansion offers up more of what you liked about the
original, it's good enough. Besides, at half the cost, you can't
really ask for much more, can you? According to Blizzard, you can
indeed: Brood War, the official expansion to the year's best
real-time strategy game, contains all the care, detail, and
ingenuity of a true sequel, in spite of its unlikely guise as
your typical supplement. While that's not to suggest Brood War is
a complete overhaul of the original, by continuing and enriching
Starcraft's story, and adding excellent new units and terrain,
Brood War completely revitalizes Blizzard's everlasting real-time
strategy game.
Brood War doesn't look all that much different than the original
Starcraft, although there's plenty of new visual content.
Fortunately, Starcraft's graphics have aged nicely, and the game
still looks great. Brood War's new units fit right in with the
returning cast, and although the new snow terrain is too bright,
the twilight and desert tile sets are beautifully drawn.
Meanwhile, the stylish new intro movie and ending cinematics for
each of the three campaigns are emotionally moving and tie in
much more closely with the larger story than the original
Starcraft's cutscenes.
Brood War boldly improves upon Starcraft's unforgettable audio,
with new music and sound effects and a lot of new speech. Each of
the three races gets a new music track, and all of it is
outstanding, particularly the orchestral Terran theme that
eclipses the New Agey stuff from the original. With the exception
of the Dark Archon who sounds like he has laryngitis, all the new
units in Brood War sound every bit as good as the originals, and
many of them have very amusing things to say if you keep on
clicking. Every surviving character from the original Starcraft
returns with many more speaking lines in most cases, and as in
the first game, the voice acting in Brood War is first-rate. With
rare exceptions, the dialogue during mission briefings and during
frequent in-game scripted events is completely convincing and
adds up to what's one of the year's best stories in any gaming
genre. It picks up right where the first game left off, and much
like the original, the three plots are brilliantly written to be
both self-contained and deeply connected.
As you'd expect, the Brood War campaign is much more difficult
than the original Starcraft campaign. Nevertheless, the missions
are far superior by design. They're heavily plot driven, with
scripted story events frequently punctuating the action.
Occasionally your mission objectives will change after you
complete what you thought was the extent of your duty. At other
times you'll be given a choice of objectives, and your decision
will directly affect the course of the following mission. New
units are introduced in context, and the scenario will teach you
to use them by demanding you take advantage of their particular
specialties. It is worth noting, though, that the designers start
to run out of steam by the end, as the innovative scenarios that
permeate the Protoss and Terran campaigns finally give way to
more straightforward against-all-odds Zerg-centric massacres,
although the story remains captivating to the end.
With Brood War, Blizzard took the rtunity to reevaluate the
play balance of an already well-designed real-time strategy game.
The results are outstanding; seemingly minor but terribly
significant modifications to unit costs, damage rates, hit
points, and build times suddenly make the game play very
differently, as units that were once ineffective (such as the
Protoss Dragoon and the Terran Goliath) are powerless no longer.
In the end, almost every single unit in the game has been changed
in one way or another. Likewise Blizzard addressed the common
complaint that Starcraft catered itself toward rush tactics,
where an early attack by basic units would often prove decisive,
by augmenting defensive structures to better handle small numbers
of weak units. These changes to the original units are included
not only in Brood War, but in the Starcraft 1.04 patch.
At the same time, the six new units in Brood War demand serious
consideration, as each race now has the means to deal with enemy
swarm tactics. Now more than ever, the player who just piles up
one type of unit will surely lose to he who combines his forces.
The end result of all the changes and additions is a game that
feels much more strategic than before. The only consequence is
that Starcraft's interface, which demands that you carefully
micromanage your forces, is ill-equipped to handle the game's
newfound complexity, and without some serious practice you'll
have trouble putting the specialized new units to good use.
Moreover, if you're weary of the real-time strategy formula that
culminated in Starcraft, you may be put off that Brood War, when
you get right down to it, is fundamentally similar.
Nevertheless, if you liked Starcraft in the least, it doesn't
take a great deal of thought to understand that Brood War is
essential. What with the superb campaign, the new units, the
overhauled gameplay, and dozens of new multiplayer s, you have
both a more-than-worthy successor to Starcraft and one of the
finest computer game expansion sets of all time. --Vik Saggeran
--Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction
in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written
permission of GameSpot is prohibited. -- GameSpot Review
