Official licensed products made by a third party don't usually work out too well...
I am not saying that people can't take the original product and modify to some degree of success. Anyone looking at Counter-Strike based on the Half-life game would realize that third party ingenuity, can at times, bring a breath of fresh air and even possibly improve the original product. Though there were high hopes for anything labeled with the prestigious "Starcraft" name, Aztech could not match the original product in anyway shape or form.
For starters, the game doesn't actually expand anything in any real sense. There are no new units, or any remotely as captivating as the game it is based on. Instead, the game comes with 30 new single player missions and a few dozen multiplayer maps, many that were probably created in less than three minutes for each.
The single player mission in Starcraft, and also Brood Wars, were genuinely captivating with their unique characters and the dilemmas they encountered as they fought to live another against the other factions. In Insurrection, the story line is more of a side bar in the Starcraft universe in the system of Brontes IV. You will not see any of the original characters, which is fine, except for the fact that the cast of goons they put together sound like they're permanently constipated and it's really hard to care about these guys. In fact, all of the 'Heroes' you will use throughout the thirty missions are unbelievably just normal units. The guys at Aztech obviously weren't given the code to actually create new units so they just put in the same unit and change the name. In fact, for the case of the dropship, there is no hero dropship so they just disable you from building other dropships but it doesn't say Morgan. No, it says dropship and they really takes you out of the game. Not only that, but they could not change the voices of the units so only at triggered points in the game, do they speak and then they are back to their original unit voice. So disappointing!
At least, in the campaign briefings, they did an 'okay' job at trying to put together a somewhat coherent story in the universe of Starcraft but so many times, briefings are too long and they yap and yap and yap to the point that you don't even care anymore. The story is okay but in the end suffers from implementation and poor mission structure.
What's worse with the single player campaign is that it is completely filled to the brim with flaws and bugs. You can not even beat the first mission because they inserted incorrect map triggers! Yup, that's right! You can not even beat the first mission because whoever put it together doesn't even know how to put the map triggers in right so it crashes! There's actually two more levels with the same problem! Now, you could go to the website and download the correct maps but those were taken down in early 2001 so since then, you're stuck with buggy maps you can't even play through. This doesn't mean you can't beat the campaign because the maps are custom made so you could just start playing off at mission 2 or 3 or 10 if you wanted to but it kinda defeats the purpose.
Multiplayer maps are just as horrid, believe or not! Many of them are completely foolish in their design. It was like, there was no consideration for balance or fair play. Some maps have some players starting farther away from the minerals while some players get them closer. How is that fair? Who rationalized to themselves, that would be a fun and fair map to play with friends or people over the Internet? There's even a few maps where some players start on higher elevation! The list goes on with maladies of the maps in both single and multiplayer.
Everything this "game" has to offer is basically a collection of a poor campaign, which wasn't tested at all, multiplayer maps with no polish nor refinement and a big thirty dollar price tag. Starcraft: Insurrection is a monumental failure in every way. Even for five dollars, this would not have been worth it. After seeing so many great multiplayer maps for free on the Internet and even better single player campaigns like the Antioch Chronicles, it really shows you that there is no need for a product like this. It doesn't play well and when it does play, it sucks! Stay away from this game. I promise you will not regret it.