Star Trek: Legacy

Star Trek: Legacy attempts to simulate the spectacular battles that have been brought to our screens in the Trek universe over the years.

From the very first series with Kirk, Spock and Bones to the latest with Scott Bakula of Quantum Leap fame, ‘Legacy’ features campaigns in all 5 timelines.

Gameplay is relatively simple. Target an enemy vessel and left click to fire phasers, right click to launch some photons. That’s about it really – you can mess about with power assignments (i.e. boost shield strength at the expense of engine efficiency and weapon strength) which, at harder levels, adds a bit more of a tactical edge to the combat – but essentially it comes down to overpowering the enemy with your weapons before they can do the same to you. You can also target individual subsystems of enemy vessels, like the engines to slow them down, but you are still just clicking the left or right buttons and watching the action unfold. You can manually control your vessel yourself but this is pretty clumsy and you often end up disorientated as the twitchy camera switches about all over the place.

Between missions you find yourself “buying” a fleet to increase your chances in the missions ahead. I’m not a fan of this sort of game device, to be honest, so this bit of the review may appear perplexing to some…but it just goes against the grain, for me. Imagine Jean-Luc Picard contacting Starfleet and saying, “Ok, I’ll give you 1000 credits for a Cruiser and 500 for a scout”. It doesn’t sit right in a Star Trek game and feels tacked on because so many other games include the feature. It would have been far better to be assigned certain ships at the start of each mission by Starfleet.

All of this makes the battles, the ‘point’ of the game you could say, flat and uninspired. The ease with which you can repair your ship, especially on the easiest level of difficulty, makes it very hard to actually die. One of my ships lasted 10 minutes fighting the entire Romulan attack fleet in one particular mission – something that drains any excitement from the battle sequences. Add to this the in-engine cut-scenes which are about as cinematic as an episode of Kerching, the lack of differentiation between each campaign (the only difference is often just the voice narrating the story changing) and you get a pretty bland game altogether.

I’ll admit I haven’t got all the way through the game yet but it does seem like I’ve seen pretty much all I’m going to see in terms of gameplay. It just doesn’t engage enough to warrant a great score. I just hope that one day developers will realise that the Star Trek universe isn’t really suited to action-based gameplay. Elite Force worked to an extent but the core reasons why fans are so dedicated to the whole brand is storyline, characterisation and so on – perhaps I’m wrong but the most interesting Star Trek game on the horizon is the MMO that is in development. That has the potential, if done properly, to be a Warcraft beater. Sadly, Legacy is another in a long list of wishy-washy Star Trek games. Bring back the old point-and-click style is all I can say!

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