The balance among the StarCraft races is near masterful

Neck-and-neck with Total Annihilation as the best of the best, Blizzard's StarCraft breaks new ground not in technology or even playability, but in versatility, refinement and creativity. Sporting what is easily one of, if not *the* most involving and original single-player campaigns ever seen, StarCraft may not be cutting edge, but it's incredibly fun and well-designed. And, after seeing the amount of polish that went into the game, there's little doubt about what all the long delays in StarCraft's development were for.

The 30-mission, single-player campaign is divided into three chapters - each focusing on one of the game's three races of people. Blizzard designed the three segments to be taken in order because they actually tell a very good story, but you can choose to play them out of order as well. The missions start off by getting you acquainted with the idiosyncrasies of each race, and the difficulty level curve is almost perfect. The levels often go far beyond the simple "build base/destroy enemy" mold, even including covert missions where you have only a small group that must strike inside the enemy's stronghold. There is also a strong focus on controllable "hero" characters who are important to the storyline and must survive the missions.

While the races have general similarities, they still manage to be surprisingly different from one another, and learning to use and counter each of the race's unique attributes is a big part of the game. The Zerg are a parasitical hive race whose units are all living creatures formed from larva. They can infect other races, regenerate health and build fearsome armies relatively fast. The Protoss are a psychic race who warp in new units and extend the range of their base by building large channeling crystals called Pylons. They are strong fighters with innate psychic shields, but have slower building times. Humans are in the middle, but their cloaking technology can leave unsuspecting enemies powerless to fight back.

The balance among the races is near masterful and especially apparent in multiplayer games. In addition to the usual assortment of standard deathmatching and team modes, multiplayer missions against the computer add a great new element of cooperative play. There are a horde of multiplayer maps and missions, support for up to eight over a LAN or over BattleNet, and the levels themselves show off an incredibly wide variety of terrain (in both single and multiplayer) - jungles, cities, space stations, military bases, harsh barren worlds and more. BattleNet play was fairly stable over all, though the game oddly lacks a straight TCP/IP connection option, which is a serious omission.

There are a number of other flaws in the game as well, especially in regards to the player unit AI. Pathfinding still needs work and watching some of the units trying to find their way is often either amusing or pathetic, and units can even get irreversibly stuck between buildings. StarCraft's unit line of sight (LOS) thankfully includes true use of elevations but, even on flat plans, the limit to the awareness radius of your troops seemed a bit too small. And there's still plenty of troop babysitting to do when the action heats up as your guys don't always work very autonomously. The AI is still very solid overall, however, and better than Age of Empires, but not as good as the tweakable AI in either Dark Reign or Total Annihilation.

Graphically, StarCraft has very detailed terrain and units, great explosions and decent character animation. The audio is also well done, with great sound effects, a nice soundtrack and some talented voice work. The game's powerful built-in campaign editor allows the creation of virtually any sort of map -- single or multiplayer, stand-alone missions or custom campaigns. The editor is fairly easy to use as well (mainly point and click interfaces), assuring the game a long life.

Despite some noticeable flaws in the AI, StarCraft is a superbly fun, involving and even innovative game. While it doesn't have all the advances that many of us would have liked, both the single and multiplayer gameplay is topnotch, and the game is sure to please both casual and hardcore real time strategy gamers.