StarCraft: Insurrection is great, actually

Despite its godawful map design and hilarious low budget voice acting, I think the actual plot of StarCraft: Insurrection is surprisingly good and in some ways superior to the original game. Bear with me…

A key problem with the original game campaigns is their inconsistency. Characters will flip 180 between scenes in order to force the plot towards a particular direction, even though it makes no sense to behave this way. The world around them bends over backwards to enable them even if realistically they should not get away with any of this.

For example, as I have complained about in other posts, Tassadar claims to be helping the terrans but in actuality incinerates inhabited planets rather than working towards a real solution. He constantly abandons his duty to do weird random acts to force the plot forward. He abandons the terrans to their fate in order to visit Char. He allies with Raynor despite having no reason to. He surrenders to the Conclave to halt the bloodshed, then congratulates the Executor for slaughtering a bunch of protoss to rescue him. 

And so on. These characters are garbage. I heard rumors the writer was high and I find that totally plausible.

Anyway, the Insurrection campaign is not well designed. The map design is terrible and is probably the reason why it was forgotten. However, the actual story of the campaign is surprisingly good for being a low budget first-time effort. The writers were not dedicated writers, but worked on other aspects like programming, voice acting and sound editing. It is not a great story by any stretch, but the writers demonstrate a much better grasp of consistent characterization and world building compared to whoever wrote the original game. They were probably not high when they wrote it.

The campaign for Insurrection is roughly the same length as the original game campaign, or about thirty missions with ten per race. In contrast to the original game, which compresses the alien invasion of terran space largely into the background of the "Rebel Yell" campaign, the story here focuses entirely on the battle for the planet Brontes IV during the same span. This immediately gives it an advantage over the original game, since it is able to spend more time exploring how the battle affects Brontes IV over time rather than jumping around between a bunch of different planets and subplots.

(There's a transcript of the manual and campaigns here, for reference. However, I strongly recommend watching Nral's abridged story playthrough to experience the lulzy dialogue.)

In the terran campaign, the story focuses on the Brontes Militia fighting off the zerg invasion, discovering the Fist of Redemption in the process. The Fist of Redemption is led by cultists, like the rogue ghost Carpenter, who believe the zerg will rescue mankind, so they attempt to sabotage the war effort. There seems to be a suggestion here that the zerg are taking advantage of this and manipulating the rebels somehow, as zerg are encountered in one of their installations. They may have been sending psychic dreams to Carpenter and other sensitive psychics, though this is never stated outright. Escalating paranoia led to civil war between the government and some of the militia, allowing Fist of Redemption operatives to take control before being ousted by "outlaw" forces.

In the protoss campaign, the story focuses on the arrival of the protoss in the system and their disagreements over how to deal with the zerg infestation. The protoss split ultimately split into two factions, one that allies with the terrans against the zerg and another that dismisses terran losses as collateral damage while fighting the zerg. The protoss manage to land a significant blow against the zerg, forcing the zerg to infest the Fist of Redemption cultists to supplement their numbers. The protoss are ultimately forced into fighting each other, with the terran sympathizers emerging victorious.

In the zerg campaign, the story focuses on the arrival of other zerg broods to Brontes IV. The original broods assigned to Brontes IV have gone rogue after infesting the ghost Carpenter and must be cleansed before they can interfere with the invasions elsewhere. The zerg are successful and take Brontes for themselves. The remaining terran and protoss characters are all killed, leaving no hooks for a sequel story. This is probably the least interesting campaign because there are only two zerg characters, Overmind and Nargil, and they're one-note.

What I like about this campaign is that it builds upon plot hooks introduced in the manual and short story "Revelations" that were otherwise ignored by the original game. Some of the protoss ally with the terrans to repel the zerg, while still in terran space where this alliance would be relevant and organic rather than feeling forced and unnecessary. The concept of an alliance between terrans and zerg is introduced in a way that feels believable: the terrans are cultists being manipulated by the zerg before ultimately being consumed. The zerg's battle with Carpenter both illustrates how psychics could be valuable test subjects for the zerg's warfare and gives a plausible justification for zerg versus zerg conflict that lasts longer than just one mission. 

Unfortunately, it suffers a similar issue to the original game in that the campaigns being arranged by racial point of view means that certain perspectives are never given. In particular, we never see the perspective of the zerg who originally invaded Brontes IV. We don't learn their reasons for being there beyond the generic alien invasion and a brief explanation that they, Incubus Brood, specialize in recon, subterfuge and sabotage. There's some implication that they were deliberately manipulating the Fist of Redemption, but this is never concretely confirmed.

The plot is crude but serviceable. The terran campaign jumps perspectives a few times early on, making it feel meandering until the character Jack Frost becomes the de facto protagonist. The protoss campaign jumps into a terran/protoss alliance pretty quick and doesn't address the reticence that terrans would probably feel after the glassing of Chau Sara being the point of public first contact. The zerg campaign is basically a cleanup to sever any plot threats that could come up later, but I appreciate how the writers and voice actor tried to make Nargil sound more interesting by giving it a verbal tic.

Maybe if they'd had more time, budget and creative freedom, then maybe this story could've been memorable. Unfortunately, it's a footnote in the history of StarCraft. That said, while the story isn't amazing, it at least tried to be more coherent than the haphazard campaign stories made by Blizzard.