What an incredibly confident, polished game. A huge leap forward from WARCRAFT II and probably pound-for-pound the best game Blizzard has ever made.

Great, balanced races that are each unique and compelling in their own ways. A superb story in single-player (especially for the genre) which isn't particularly deep but has just enough characterization and really excellent voice acting to sell the fairly standard sci-fi drama. A cohesive look and feel that is just cartoony enough, just realistic enough, just violent enough, just goofy enough, just grimdark enough to find some kind of funny balance that seems all its own. Tons of little details in the units and structures and the art to suggest a lot more about the setting than is in the text and fully avoid any kind of exhaustive loredumps.

Really, this game is about the polish. Love and attention in every corner. The kind of game that feels like it must have just appeared one day, fully-formed. Immaculately conceived rather than developed. There are a couple things you could wish were a bit different, but I feel like there are few games that were this destined to be iconic. They must have known how special it was sending it out the door.

Blizzard had a deal to make a Warhammer 40k RTS that fell through the gutter, they said fuck it and made a copyright-dodging facsimile of the same setting with many of it's original iconography still intact, that's where starcraft came from.

The game is good, but simple, probably is greatest complexity is the 3 faction structure that makes all of them seem exotic in comparisson to one another. But the deal here is that that complexity is explored very well on a solid narritive campaign spread through 3 acts, one for each faction.

Although it is more famous for it's modding scene nowdays, the main campaign is worth you time, even if it becomes repetitive to the end of it's narrative run, with nothing other than "destroy your enemie's base" type missions with just more stuff to blow up.

Nostalgia can blind just about anybody that played it back when it launched, so it is safe to say that the story isn't realy all that special, with so many film references that you can actually number in the hundreds the ammount of stuff that was borrowed outright from other media material.

So yeah, good, but only for the RTS afficionados that are by themselves a dying breed in the videogaming community.

HEY LOOK ITS AGE OF EMPIRE IN SPAAAAAACE

no honestly, this game is pretty good and has a lot of difference with age of empire: they are only 3 faction but are really different, unlike age of empire, has actually a "original" story but not really exciting cheatcode, unlike age of empire, better graphism and music, but less gamemode and creative mode, unlike age of empire. But both has a good atmosphere for the time

Yeah, the games are really different and starcraft can be blast, even tho you dont like age of empire

I like both tho

For an optional visual aid, here's a link that might break:
https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/The_New_Dominion

Click on the image then select "see full sized image" and zoom in on the top left corner.

If the link is broken, look up "Starcraft 1 Zerg Mission 3" and find a picture of the map.

~

There's really a special kind of beauty in a Starcraft map - particularly in the ways that units and structures occupy it.

Starcraft displays most of its necessary visual information (where things are, and what they are) in a pretty blunt, pretty straightforward way. Units might be much bigger or smaller in the "lore" than they appear in-game, but we can't have units that are too big, it'd be a huge mess of visual garbage. Structures exist on an invisible grid, turning the formation of your base into something of a little SimCity/Tetris minigame. There's plenty of natural visual flourish, like magma beneath rocky terrain, the different colors on different maps, the little neutral creatures that roam around sometimes. But the grid-based building system and player-created units/structures mean that there's something special going on with the way that any given Starcraft match looks.

Take Supply Depots for example. You generally want to keep them out of the way so you aren't cluttering up your base, which may mean you clump them up together in a corner, but you also might use them to wall off certain areas, to prevent anything from getting into your base, or to make a strategic little tunnel that only your Marines (and not enemy Zealots) can get through.

A Bunker, likely filled with 4 Marines, can cover a ramp leading into your base. If any enemy land units want in, they have to come past the Bunker. If they want to stop the Marines from firing, they'll need to destroy the Bunker. So putting one right next to the ramp is just obviously a great idea, and even when I was a baby I knew this - in part, maybe, because the singleplayer enemies also make use of these basic strategies most of the time.

Because of the function of Bunkers and Supply Depots, because of what they mechanically represent, they tend to be placed in specific, frequent patterns. Most players will place them similarly, which creates a sort of strategically and culturally-evolved aesthetic that defines how Starcraft looks at any given moment.

Here are some more examples;

Siege Tanks can frequently be found on the high ground, overlooking the outskirts of a base. They might be stacked together to maximize damage within a specific spot, or spread out to increase the area covered by their fire.

Missile Turrets are usually placed in a very particular way, spread out across the edges of a base so that they can totally wall off enemy air units from entering the base without getting hit - a much more tactically sound distribution than simply clumping them up haphazardly.

All of this planning, all of these details and strategies, come together to form the aesthetics of Starcraft. Sure, the maps would still be cool with nothing on them, but they're beautiful in the midst of a battle, when the game's mechanics and language and strategies naturally direct the aesthetic in pretty unique way.

It sort of goes without saying, but part of why this is so cool is because you can totally disregard all of these strategies and just randomly build wherever, but I think pretty much any human being who plays this game, regardless of skill level, will develop some sort of personal decisions about where and how they place buildings/units. They will develop a sort of visual style, in that way. Most players, though, will adopt relatively similar visual styles, as a result of shared knowledge and experience about what positions and formations find the most success. These styles are created, then, through the game's teaching (singleplayer campaigns), through the player's own process of learning, and through shared information and cultural knowledge (information we learn from other players, guides, etc. or just "common sense" ideas like defending tight choke points that many people will simply know and execute without being told to).

And there's way more of this stuff than just the few things I've mentioned - look at the massive clusters of Gateways, Factories, or Hatcheries that we build in neat arrays so that we can efficiently create armies, or the way we might scatter a couple of Marines or Dragoons around the base in case we need them to support our anti-air defenses in a pinch.

If you hop into the middle of a random Starcraft match, or observe the pre-made layouts of enemy AI bases in the singleplayer campaigns, the game's visual appearance will be more than just its sprites, more than just its polygons or pixels - it will represent the mechanical language of the game, the strategies players use to win games, and the advantageous "city planning" techniques which give rise to a loosely unified (though still player-expressive) set of "visual rules" for each and every structure and unit in the game.