Starcraft : Prima's Official Strategy Guide

 (38 customer reviews)

Strangely enough the people at Prima managed to skew the guide to one of the best games of all time by forgetting the fact that most of the players have already read the manual (and those who have not have not done so either because they don't care for hints or the game was rented). In fact, the guide has even less information than the manual - whereas the manual lists the strengths and weaknesses of the units as well as the buildings. The guide had one paragraph to say about the human's entire architectural menagerie. This would have been completely acceptable had the book attempted to reveal the web of srtategy possible with StarCraft ( defensive unit combinations, strategic turret positioning, formations, expansion rates, among others). The guide remains mysteriously silent on all these topics, instead repeating the information routinely found in the manual, adding - drumroll, please! - ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! I have nothing to say but: if you have the manual, you already...Read more

This book came free with the "Battle Chest" but I really wish they had included the game manual instead. (If you want that, you have to print it from the PDF file on the CD.) The "strategy guide" is really a rehashed reference for the different races which could be useful if not for the choppy, amateurish writing, and just the enormous amount of black ink used in printing this book (I half expected my fingers to get black from flipping through the pages). The maps are slightly helpful, but really close to worthless because of the poor contrast and lack of color. So far, I have gone through every mission on my own without the strategy guide, only consulting it after I completed a mission. I found their "strategies" to really lack imagination and in some cases were completely unrealistic. Their main take on each mission is to do as little as you have to in order to win the mission and advance to the next. I find a lot more fun in exploring all the...Read more

Don't read the other reviews. Authors surely didn't play Starcraft before. Here is a quote from the guide (p. 17): "Vulture is a hovercycle that's fast, powerful, and very effective when quick response time is critical... very effective, when you are defending a sprawling base". Vultures are useless against everything except infantry. The "easy to follow general strategies" are general strategies, which is almost impossible to use against human opponent. No strategy guide gives you info on a building order for fastest development.