Customer Reviews

Star Trek: Starfleet Command

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I was a late addition playtester for this game, winning a spot via a writing contest. Star Fleet Command is based heavily on Star Fleet Battles, a strategic board game put out by Amarillo Design Bureau. I myself am more of an SFB fanatic than a Trekker, and like most SFB players, have been wanting a SFB based computer game for more than 10 years. Star Fleet Command was a noble effort, but it falls short. For myself, I feel it was due to a "rush to market" attitude within the leadership of Interplay. They didn't seem to take the comments of us playtesters seriously, and let most of the bugs we had found and had been screaming about go right into production. It left something of a sour taste in my mouth. As much as I'd like to say this game is the end-all be-all for both Trek fans and SFB fanatics like myself, I can't. It's a mediocre game, falling far short of what it had the potential to be, and by all rights what it should have been. It's OK, but not great.

OK, if you never played the SFB board game, you might find this game to be just fine, and it is better than the average sorry#$@ Star Trek title. This was marketed for the SFB audience, however, and here the game is a big disappointment. The worst is multiship control. Your wingmen AI is poor to non-existent. Individual ship control is good to excellent, albeit a bit cumbersome. But it is impossible to control 3 ships at once in the heat of battle and the interface and AI make the simplest commmands to squadron members ineffectual at best. You literally cannot even have your wingmen attack one target while you combat another.

The mission briefings are hopelessly inadequate and you will have to buy the aftermarket strategy guide to have any clue as to what you are expected to do. There does not seem to be much connection between your battlefield success and the campaign game.

The fact that they redid most of the ship visuals is nitpicking after these more serious flaws, but if you are an SFB fan you expect double saucer hulled Gorns with orange triangle insignia and catamaran and trimaran Lyran hulls that don't look like 23rd century vacuum cleaners. And the Hydrans were just completely redone with no similarity to the original.

Despite this, the ship to ship combat works well, and the graphics are marvelous. Even the cloaking device is handled correctly, although this would have been easy to botch up. This product needs a sequel that gets the other parts right.

P.S. Forget playing for the Federation in this game, since the combat algorithm makes photon toredoes miss about 75% of the time.

This game is masterful in its conversion of the boardgame Star Fleet Battles (SFB) to the computer. It utilizes almost every aspect of the computer's capabilities to perfection. This game is a MUST HAVE for any fan of SFB or any Star Trek fan! As an original trekkie and 20 year veteran of SFB, I believe this is the best Trek game ever! However, be warned that the learning curve is incredibly steep for anyone who is not a veteran of SFB. The tutorials are very good at teaching the fundamentals of starship command AND essential. The graphics and special effects are excellent! The interface, although not intuitive, is highly conducive to good game play once you learn it. The sound track is really the only area of deficiency, and should have been better, given all of the Star Trek music that is available plus whatever was composed for the game.

I really anticipated the release of this game, as all Gaming Magazines had rated this game off the charts! After purchasing the game, I went through the tutorials, and read the entire instruction booklet. I found the ship relatively easy to control, and figured out all of the controls fairly easily. The graphics were spectacular! What I didn't like was the boring game play, and graphics glitches, ie. Flying right into a planetkiller, and no damage to your ship. The gameplay was boring because of an excessive lack of a GOOD storyline. Whoopee, Decker's on the loose. That was about it. They could have made the mission briefings 10x better. There basically was none. How about having the capability to go to warp speed. INTERPLAY- TRY COMBINING AN RPG, AND A COMBAT SIM WITH A GOOD STORYLINE AND THE SAME GRAPHICS QUALITY FROM THIS GAME. IT WOULD BE HUGE! Also, I felt there was absolutely ZERO replayability. Overall, I give it a one.

The game is incredibly detailed, the graphics are incredible, and the AI is solid (hence the 2 stars) but the interface has far too many buttons to control in the heat of battle. Couple this with an underwritten instruction manual (filled mostly with ship specs, all of which are available in game) and you have a rather frustrating adventure ahead of you. But let's talk about the adventure itself. The campaign system is poorly designed, and the control interface falls horribly flat when trying to control more than one ship. At first I thought it was pretty dumb to have a limit of 3 ships (the game is based on Star FLEET Battles, after all) but then after experiencing the frustration of watching your vessels do the opposite of what you intended them to do I understood why the limit was 3 ships. Additionally, the progression of missions in the campaign doesn't seem to follow an interactive approach (i.e. fighting Gorns while stationed on the opposite side of the galaxy), so you never get the sense of the fate of the galaxy hanging in the balance. No, you get a set plot course vastly similar to the Wing Commander games, despite the claims on the packaging. I won't go into detail about vague mission descriptions and abstract victory conditions. I'll wait for an improved sequel (if it ever gets made).

First, let me sya that I like this game. It is fine 3D space combat sim. What disappointed me, however, is that it was marketed as a computer version of the ever popular "Star Fleet Battled" board game. What dis appointed me was that I was misled: it is a fine game but it is not a computer version of SFB and does not mirror the "beer and pretzels" feel that makes Star Fleet Battles so much fun.

This is basically a well done real-time space combat simulation with the words "Star Trek" in the title. I was expecting a straight "computerization" of Star Fleet Battles. This is what I was led to believe by reading the reviews in the computer games magazines. This kind of conversion has been done successfully before (try a copy of Hasbro Interactive's "Axis and Allies").

I don't really need the memory and processor intensive 3D views and first person perspective. A 2D, top-down view of the game, with a hex grid map, would have been fine. And the "OK, we all move one space, then we all move another space, then we all move another space, etcetera" movement scheme in Star Fleet Battles was great and I was expecting a computer version of that. The real-time movement is fine, but it doesn't really simulate the feel of the board game.

Bottom Line: If you like good 3D space combat simulations, give this game a try. If you wan't the computer version of Star Fleet Battles, you will have to wait some more!

I spent many hours playing the old Star Fleet Battles board game. It was fun and fascinating, requiring tremendous strategy and most of all, patience. Patience is required to READ THE BOOK before playing. And yes, none of us likes to do that. If you think the book with the CD is thick -- you should've seen the old one! It was over 240 pages *(8 x 11 all small type) and that doesn't include all of the addendums and errata!If you are a fan of the game. Buy it! In fact, I am a Mac user (have 4) and bought a Compaq PC solely for the purpose of playing the game.

Did you ever want to buy a Star Trek game that offered excellent tutorial functions, a realistic on-screen display and 3D rendering gameplay that allowed you sit in captain's chair? Well, it's here so you better click Buy Now! because this is the game you've been waiting for. Play one of 5 races: Federation, Klingon, Romulan, Gorn, Lyran, or Hydran. All races have their own unique ships and game play which looks pretty close to what you see on the box...which is very unusual for any pc games. The opening movies are the best I've seen compared to games of its time and the bugs that are in this game are minimal. (Having a decent video card is a must - 4 mb video ram is minimal but I say at least 16 mb). This game will run on an old Pentium computer that has a good video card. It allows you to adjust options and tweak it a bit to fit your machine. It has a number of options, ships, crew selection, missions, and so forth that you choose from. I have been playing this game for a year and it is most fun I have had with any real time strategy game. This game gets my highest regard so it is highly recommended - you will not be disappointed!!!

While this game does provide very nice graphics, it doesn't offer much else. One annoying 'feature' is that the Klingon interface is in Klingon, the Gorn interface is in Gorn, etc. which may be fine for Trek Heads but most of us humans will only be able to read the Federation interface. Once you get accustomed to which controls are where and/or you learn the keyboard shortcuts the gameplay is smooth and easy, but it takes time to just to learn the interface.

The multiplayer game setup interface is also quite awkward to utilize. Unlike other games which have one player click "host" and then the others simply join that game, this product has one player hit "select" then "host" then "announce" while the other players click "select", "setup", "join" - why are other players "setting up" a game! While this isn't a show stopper, it is annoying.

Another critical failing of this game is that the ships can only fly in two dimensions! This *IS* space, right? Granted, the game is modeled after the board game which only allowed two dimensions, but why not allow the computer to do what it does best and add the third dimension?

Besides the above, the game does have excellent graphics and offers great multiplayer action (especially which each player taking a different race). Star Trek fans will love it and I suspect the board gamers will like it. However, it falls short of its potential.

While this game has it's problems, I'd have to say it was hands down the best game of 1999 that I purchased. It captures all the best elements of both the old Starfleet Battles board game and a real time strategy computer game, while wrapping it up with excellent graphics, sounds and a fresh, new look that should please old fans of both.

Unlike the old Starfleet Battles, the ships have been redesigned to have a more current look, rather like those seen in the movies. The weapon effects are well done, and the damage algorithim stays true to the board game...though, for some insane reason the torpedoes for the Federation only hit about half the time.

While the interface can be overwhelming due to the amount of control you have, the designers put in a pause feature that lets you issue orders and set up for combat in relative peace. This comes in handy.

The biggest gripes I have with the game are the poor mission breifings and the mindless wingman A.I. The breifings are next to useless, and will leave you feeling frustrated and confused. The wingmen you can have are worse than useless. Not only will the not follow your instructions, many times they will shoot up targets and destroy them after you've expressly ordered them not to, loosing the mission for you.

Despite it's flaws, I still think this was a great game, and look forward to a new, improved "gold edition."