Starcraft: Brood War

Well, it could hardly go wrong, could it? The original Starcraft is a great game, and Blizzard has the brains not to ruin it. I had high expectations on Brood War, and it lives up to them. It's difficult, but well balanced, and has more of everything you want. New music, heroes, story and movies. There's actually more on the Brood War CD than on the Starcraft CD (in megabytes, that is). That's value for money for you ... The standard is set as soon as the intro movie breaks loose on the screen, complete with dramatic opera music and rampaging Zerg hordes.

The story line is as good as you'd expect, with the same excellent briefings and voice-acting as ever. The story itself may be a bit on the twisty and turning side, allowing all sorts of alliances and opponent combinations, but there's absolutely nothing wrong about it and it builds directly on the Starcraft plot, taking up where it left off. Just getting to know what will happen next is a big motivation to complete the missions. And at the end of each campaign you are rewarded with one of those excellent movie sequences. Makes it worth all your time, even if the missions would have been really boring, which they aren't.

The missions are varied, but often very hard. They are, however, never impossible, even if it feels close some times. The last Protoss mission, for example, saw me fail only seconds from completing the mission several times. Very frustrating ... And still, I had only turned off the computer before I started thinking about what I should have done to win. You know a game is good when things like that happens.

The new units are cool too, with all the funny comments you want. They're useful too, not just variations of old units. Medics, for example, are very nice to have, both able to heal and blind enemy units. And they say "Where does it hurt?" in a disturbingly cheerful way too ...

Perhaps least exciting in this expansion are the new tilesets. The twilight setting isn't very exciting but very dark blue, and the ice setting feels like it could use some brighter colours here and there (and why can't ice be placed next to water?). The desert, on the other hand, is nice. It even has some civilian building doodads, something I think should have been in all the tilesets. The campaign editor has been tweaked too, some nice triggers for controlling and moving units have been added.

Brood War is for all of us who played through Starcraft, if you didn't you may find Brood War a bit too difficult. Still, it's hard to see how Starcraft possibly could get any better than this ...

Now, if you excuse me, I have a campaign to finish ...

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