After some delays, StarCraft: Mass Recall is complete and ready to play. It’s a StarCraft 2 mod remake of the original StarCraft’s campaign, expansion, demo and more. Better still, it’s compatible with the free SC2 Starter Edition, effectively making it a free game. When I last covered this and other SC2 mods, only the first three campaigns were available, with the remaining missions needing work to keep up with StarCraft 2’s mod-breaking patches. Below, a trailer comparing Blizzard’s own StarCraft: Remastered to today’s new Mass Recall. Personally, I prefer the latter.

Technically, Mass Recall has been around for years, and was ‘complete’ previously. The release of the Remastered version and some big patches for SC2 prompted the team to do some renovation work. Today’s v7.1 release is the most polished version by far. They’ve put in a ton of love and effort in an attempt to make this the definitive version of StarCraft’s story mode. While Mass Recall borrows assets (voices, cutscenes, etc) from the original game, Blizzard have made no effort to halt the previous six versions of this project. Number seven should be just as lucky.



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While not a perfect 1:1 adaptation (that’s what Remastered is), Mass Recall remains my favourite way to play the story of an RTS classic. Thanks to an extensive in-game options panel, you can tweak it to be as close to vanilla as StarCraft 2 will allow, or to embellish a little. Where lore appropriate, you can add Brood War units and tech to the original game, add expanded hero characters to more missions and generally bring it a little closer to modern spec. Today’s new version also lets you disable the use of non-Blizzard music during some new in-game cutscenes.

Unless you pick those changes yourself, Mass Recall’s missions are mostly unchanged since the ’90s, but look and play nicer thanks to StarCraft 2’s better UI. Unlike the original, this mod includes difficulty settings, with Hard being comparable to vanilla StarCraft (it was a tough game) and the new Brutal setting designed to push players hard. It also includes the prelude missions from the StarCraft demo, a handful of missions where you play as Stukov based on the N64 version, and support for Enslavers Redux, a new campaign built on Mass Recall’s foundations. All are optional.

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While Mass Recall is a huge mod, it’s easy to set up. Grab your copy of StarCraft 2 (either purchased or free), download all of the v7.1 (not 7.0) files from Mass Recall’s SC2Mapster page directly to your StarCraft 2 directory, then unzip the installer only. Run that, and it should unpack everything else to where it needs to be, and drop an icon on your desktop to launch the mod. You don’t even need to be logged in to play, making it DRM-free too. Mass Recall was a large team effort – check out the mod’s page for full credits.

While not included in the main download, Enslavers Redux can plug into Mass Recall. You’ll need to rename its directory to ‘8. Enslavers Redux‘ and put it in the StarCraft II\Maps\Starcraft Mass Recall\Extras directory. If you did it right, you’ll be able to launch it via the Extras panel in the Mass Recall main menu. Enjoy!