Title Star Trek Legacy Date 04.12.2007 Genre Space Combat Platform Xbox 360 Developer Mad Doc Software Publisher Bethesda Softworks

As a new player into the Star Trek games, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I'm a casual fan of the series, have watched a little bit of almost every Star Trek series that's been on television. And seen all of the movies at least once. So I knew the type of content I should expect, but not how that would translate to a game.

When you first start up the game, you are presented with three difficulties. I decided to select the "Captain" difficulty, which was this games "medium" difficulty setting.

The graphics are average in my opinion, you are presented with 3-D models of the ships, and the game focuses on them during the course of the entire campaign. You can't zoom in very far on them, and it's a shame because you'll be looking at them a lot. The space backdrops actually look pretty nice, as far as what you can do with space. Colorful nebula's and lot's of planets and moons inhabit your game playing space. But that's pretty much all there is in the graphics department. When you destroy something it gets a little “pologony”, huge blocks just kind of get sprayed outward, not the best way to destroy something, but it gets the basic job done I guess. Cut scenes are nothing more than the camera being fixed on your ship while the captain's voice is talking about his current objective, or the reason for your current conflict. So you have ships, and space backdrops. Not much else to the game, except the mini map screen, which I'll get to later.

There isn't much of a story to this game, despite it having a campaign mode. There is a story to be sure, but it feels tacked on, because your story has to span 5 generations of captains. Captain Janeway, Captain Kirk, Captain Picard, Captain Sisko, and Captain Archer, those are not necessarily in the same order you play them as in the campaign. It does try to remain linear, but without giving away to much of the plot, it's basically your enemy setting up some sinister plot way in the beginning of the game. She runs away, you chase her with another captain. She runs away again, you chase her again. You repeat this process until the end of the campaign where you finally face off in a massive space battle. During the campaign you will face a host of enemy ships, ranging from the Klingon, to the Romulan, to the Borg. I liked the fact they used all the captains, but I would rather see one solid cohesive story from a no-name captain than a disjointed story for the sake of using the celebrities.

As far as gameplay goes, it's pretty basic. You control your ships in full 3D space. Only there's not much reason to fly along the Y axis, because most of the action takes place for the most part at a predetermined altitude. There are a couple of fetch missions that have you utilize the Y axis, but they are scarce, and go by quickly.

For combat you have two choices, phasers, and photon torpedoes. Phasers damage shields greatly, and torpedoes do lots of damage to the enemy hull, but not to shields. So the basic strategy involves using phasers to diminish and remove enemy shields, and then fire torpedoes to damage their hull. During combat, you will need to manage your energy output, represented by a circle with 3 points spread out evenly among its circumference, representing shield energy, weapon energy, and engine energy. The starting point for your energy icon is in the middle of this circle, which means you have equal power going to all three systems. If you want to divert energy to another system, you move your icon to the outside of the edge of the circle towards the system you need energy for.

This comes into play during battles quite often, and is a pretty interesting gameplay mechanic. Energy to the weapon systems makes your phasers recharge faster. Energy to the engines will allow you to achieve greater speed, which you may need to escape, or to rush to defend a helpless transport full of refugees. Energy to the shields will allow you to survive longer in combat, if you are getting pummeled by two or more enemy ships for example. This energy management system is probably the best part of combat in this reviewer’s opinion.

When an enemy ship’s shields are down, you can target enemy subsystems, these again, are weapons, shields, and engines. This is a cool concept, but ultimately useless. Once shields are down, it's a matter of seconds before you destroy the enemy vessels, making time used on targeting subsystems rather pointless. Sure you can damage their engines so they can't get away, but they never try to run, and without shields they just crumble under your onslaught.

The last element of combat involves managing your ships systems. Again, this is a good idea that just got implemented in a weak manner. All you can do is repair them, and it's as simple as holding down the Left Bumper button and clicking A to start the repairs, the rest is automatic. You'll have to repair your shields, scanners, weapons, engines and other items like your hull after each battle. If your shields held out during the firefight, then you won't really need to repair much. However, if the enemy got the drop on you and managed to take out your shields, then you may find yourself retreating and waiting it out to rejoin the battle once again when your ship is repaired and ready to rejoin the fray.

To manage your ships is where the mini map screen comes in. It represents the view of the map, and important items like your ships and starbases have their own little miniature icon. Enemy ships can be spotted at range depending on your ships sensor/scanner rating. You can select any or all of your ships and move them around the game map by selecting a point on the mini map and moving them there. There seems to be a problem with moving multiple ships though when trying to warp. A lot of times, only some of your ships will warp, while others get left behind. Many cases it forces to finally individually select it, and tell it to warp several times before it finally gets the message.

Other than combat, this game doesn't offer much I'm sorry to say. You have a few other functions on these ships, things like scanning, hailing, using your tractor beam, and transporting away parties were pretty fun, but you only use them like once or twice each during the campaign, and only in specific circumstances when the story calls for it. The maps are large but offer no reason to explore them, what's the point of having 10 planets around but scanning it or transporting to it produces no results unless it's part of the mission objective. I would have liked to see more exploration / discovery elements. It would be fun to fly to a distant planet, scan it, and discover something there to help you out in the mission. But sadly, it's mostly just a waste of time.

After each mission you are offered a chance to expand your fleet. When I heard this game had fleet customization, I was pretty excited. I thought I would have the opportunity to upgrade and refit my ships however I felt. But all you can do is purchase new ships to add to your fleet. You can have up to 4 ships under your command, and you select them by pressing up, down, left, or right on the D-pad. You start with 1 ship; expand it to 2 very early in the campaign. And then are offered to buy new ships. You get command points at the end of each mission; this is what is used to purchase new ships. You can sell ships you no longer want or need for half the cost that you purchased them for. A good idea overall, but this part of the game did not seem to realize its full potential.

Sound effects were full and robust, which I was thankful to find out. It seems like too many games get the graphics right, but forget that sound is just as important. I've played too many games that seemed great at first glance, but have weak sound effects for weapons and explosions, which can just ruin the whole experience. The weapons sound crisp and powerful, and explosions are satisfying. The music fit the atmosphere and theme of the game, without drowning out the action, but there was no real tune that really stuck out in your mind. Which I guess could be a good or a bad thing depending on your point of view. Overall the sound and music were a great fit with the game though.

This game does offer online play, but during my one attempt I couldn't find a match. I wouldn't expect much more than the campaign has to offer anyways. I played a couple of battles against the CPU, and you are given a "Command Point Pool", for example 30,000 command points from which to select your ships. A huge capital ship might take up a majority of your points, while smaller lighter ships take up fewer. Depending on the point pool, you could end up with only a couple ships, a big capital ship and a lighter scout. Or you could select 4 medium ships. Point pools can be increased though, so you could conceivably have 4 very beefy ships in combat.

Overall it was a decent game. But it could have been so much more. It was far too basic and simple to draw you in completely like I had hoped it would. If all of the elements had been fleshed out a little more then I could see this game getting a much higher score. But it seems like they got the concept down, and then just ran out of steam and implemented them without the zest it deserved. If you're a fan of Star Trek, then this game will probably whet your next-gen appetite for a Star Trek game. But if you're a casual fan, then this game won't do much to increase your interest in the Star Trek universe. At the end of the day, it's just a bunch of good idea ingredients thrown into a pot, but missing the entire flavor it deserves.

Game Score

C-

Reviewed By: Contributed