Starfleet Command III (activision) PC
I would call myself a bit of trekkie – I have seen most of the movies, watched a lot the “Next Generation” episodes whilst stoned in my youth, and I know what a Klingon is. I quite like the StarTrek universe, but I’m not a full on Spock Ears wearing geek who has a crush on “7 of 9”, and I think this game is designed to appeal to the latter. Starfleet Command III is based on the 1979 tabletop strategy game called “Star Fleet Battles” and while diehard gamers or trekkies may find it fun and challenging, I found it too tedious and too repetitive to keep my interest for very long.
The game opens with an excellent intro, with starships whooshing around the screen, as Captain Picard explains the background of the game. It’s all very nice, and got me quite excited, until I started the tutorial. The tutorials adequately explain the control systems, but I found them to be so dull I ended up quitting them. The controls are pretty simple – to go left, you click left of your ship, to go right you click right of your ship. To speed up or slow down, you use a slider bar on screen and / or the number pad keys. To fire you click on the onscreen button that says “fire”. There’s a host of other things you can do, micromanage your energy, transport goods and troops, but I couldn’t really get into that, as the game was boring enough as it was.
In my mind if you’re going to port a tabletop game to PC, then utilise the power a PC has in an appropriate manner. Utilise the fact that it can represent a 3 dimensional space. The physics of space in this game are disappointingly two-dimensional… you fly flat; you can’t attack from above or below. In fact, most of the game is just flying circles around another ship, firing your weapons when your opponent is within your weapons’ firing arcs, or in other words when the “fire weapons” button on your display glows green. However, even when weapons are within range, it doesn’t mean you’ll actually hit, as hitting is dependent on the skill of your helmsman, distance, angle, and a host of other factors, as per the original table-top version of the game. So much so, you can almost hear the dice rolling as you fire your weapons. So you fire, click left to avoid their weapons, whilst your weapons charge up, fire again, click right, and so on. Battles take so long in this game you’ll end up older than Spock before you finish the first campaign.
The addition of being able to transport teams of troopers onto the ship to disable shields, engines, phasers, etc, once the shields are down, which is apparently a new feature in this 3rd edition of the game, is rather dull too. First of all, you have to have more teams of troopers then the other ship – which at first is near impossible as you have no money and no space on your ship. When you do attack you just hear the twinkle of the teleporter, and that’s about it. No visible signs of sabotage occur, no mysterious explosions or anything. A voice tells you if they were successful or not tells you, but that’s all.
The more missions you complete, the higher your Honour goes, and this acts as currency so you can upgrade your ships shields and weapons, crew and eventually buy bigger and powerful ships. Missions are gained by moving through the hexagonal mission map, another throwback to the original board game. Each time you move, there’s a chance you’ll receive a mission, plus you have to get to certain hexes before a certain time to keep the overall campaign moving. Missions range from fighting, to launching a probe, to, err, fighting. Unfortunately I didn’t get too far in a campaign, as spending two hours in one mission that’s not even important to the overall game is NOT my idea of fun. It has multiplayer, but I simply do not have days to waste battling someone else in a monotonous battle of mouse clicking. If there’s a strategy involved, it’s probably being able to stay awake to keep pressing fire.
I may be being overly harsh, as the graphics are on the good side, the music and sound authentic to the StarTrek universe, and the voice acting is quite good. The parts of the story I became involved in were quite engaging, but the fact the missions just take so long means you’ll end up ignoring the story altogether and go and play another game. This game is simply one for fans of tabletop wargaming and StarTrek, and is probably too slow and boring for regular gamers like me.