An indirect hit.
Star Trek fans have been getting it up the, ah, secondary hull for decades at this point, since before the time of Yours Truly. Just look what we’ve suffered through: An early series cancellation; a real space shuttle Enterprise that never made it to space; Star Trek III, Star Trek IV, Star Trek V and Nemesis; a series creator and a beloved principal actor taken too soon; and, a procession of video games running the gamut from ‘hobbled’ to (and I say this with love) ‘retarded with a vengeance.’
The classic justification—of a stodgy, old-boy, controlling Paramount—stopped absolving the game-makers of blame a long time ago; and while the 360 version of
Star Trek: Legacy improves on the
buggy PC game, it also beams aboard plenty of the PC’s other problems. No wonder Kirk was always smashing computers.
Star Trek Legacy has an ambitious approach, to be sure: A single game whose narrative spans the many
Trek eras, all the way from the pre-Federation
Enterpriseto the ‘classic’ (Kirk-era) shows, through to the Next Generation and into grayer, Borged-up pastures beyond. It also corrals all the voice-talent of captains Archer, Kirk, Picard, Sisco and Janeway (Scott Bakula, William Shatner, Patrick Stewart, Avery Brooks and Kate Mulgrew).
It’s true that Shatner sounds a bit tired (that Comedy Central roast really took it out of him) and Bakula sounds just plain irked (he didn’t have a chance to get tired), but the authentic voice work, like the majority of the game’s sound effects, feels Good and Just.
Straight out of space dock, Legacy’s mission looks promising: Starting off with Captain Archer’s NX-01 Enterprise, players command their single capital ship, and thenceforth control their own personal fleet of up to four starships. At any time the other three ships can be given their own basic commands or, if the need arises—and it will—the player can switch bridges, assuming direct command of each vessel in turn.
As in Bethesda’s other
current Trek titles,
Legacy gives only a functional nod here and there to secondary ship systems, sensor sweeps and/or communications. For the most part, the game focuses on raking enemy ships with phaser fire, pegging them with powerful (if dodgy) torpedoes, and just generally ripping one’s foes the proverbial New One.
The ships—almost eighty, spanning all the film and television eras, and finally giving ‘Classic Trek’ proper representation—are detailed and beautiful, even when they start getting a bit banged up. Make that especially when they start getting a bit banged up, sporting blackened phaser-scars and gushing plasma from their savaged nacelles. Legacy actually goes a bit overboard on the mortal theatrics, so don’t be too alarmed to see your heavy cruiser practically hemorrhaging ionized particles after what seem to be a few minor hits.
Explosions of individual ships are pretty impressive (even when they do seem to entail rather more debris than the original ship-mass), but other explosions are just, well, goofy-looking. Although, like a Shatner monologue, in the end it feels right. Just as important, Legacy gets the capital-starship sense of size and lumbering mass down (four out of five true Trekkers surveyed want starship combat closer to ‘sluggish and naval’ than to ‘twitchy and aerial’).
Where the PC release was riddled with more bugs than a Leonard McCoy house-call, the 360 version does, more or less what it’s
supposed to (this really shouldn’t be a point of
praise in a game review, but if you’ve recently purged your hard drive of the PC version, you’ll understand). Control on the 360 uses one stick to control your ship(s) and the other to move the camera, and the game’s proper sense of mass means that players experience that naval sense of tension as they swing their ships around, s-l-o-w-l-y bringing their weapons into the right firing arcs. Mind you, this
is praise: You might find yourself wanting to watch the Reliant vs. Enterprise clash in
The Wrath of Khan again after this one.
While you do have that small fleet of ships at your disposal, there isn’t any kind of “comprehensive” fleet command—control on the zoomed-out tactical screen is so sketchy that you’re better off sending your ships to the ball-park area where you intend an engagement, and then jumping into the captain’s chair and taking matters into your own hands from that point. Forget giving the ships in your fleet true 3D space orders, forget aggression levels or waypoints, forget giving “global” commands to your entire fleet. Tactically, it’s on the shallow side.
Alas, Legacy also suffers the same communal ‘misfortune’—I hesitate to outright call it a ‘flaw’— as other Trek games: Namely, the stubborn lack of true, Newtonian, 3D space combat (as opposed to the restricted, “fat-plane” approach defaulted to by all but a handful of space-combat titles).
Some issues do arise that range from minor radiation leaks to full-on Red Alerts, the worst of which is the brutal mid-mission save system. By which I mean, the utter lack of any; this makes it ‘challenging’ in the case of a minor skirmish, and ‘hair-tearing’ in the case of a certain damn-near hour-long mission spent warping around frantically trying to take out incoming chunks of planet-threatening space debris, missing any one of which can fail the mission. Ever wonder why so many twenty-something Trekkers are losing their hair? Now you know!
One other letdown is the inability for players to actually, intentionally, crash into something. After episodes, movies and scores of references full of romantically-misleading, naval notions of “ramming,” players who actively or passively run into another object are just effortlessly
repulsed, like a DS9 Cosplayer at a Tokyo hostess-bar, their ships just harmlessly
whanged in another direction. I’ve said it before: Wrong, wrong,
wrong.
Yet, in spite of these irritants, the challenge level stays high, and the era-spanning storyline does a good job, even significantly switching up what is expected of the player throughout the game. Just when you think it’s all about blood and antimatter, the Age of Picard rushes in, giving players some less-violent options (and perhaps giving balm to the endless dead ranks of angry redshirts from the past).
Multiplayer combat will further soothe the aches that the over demanding single player missions may instill. However, the Final Frontier isn’t as big as one might suppose: In terms of variety there are deathmatch games, and a cooperative mode in which all players have to tough out waves of never-ending foes for as long as humanly possible… and then, that’s about that. The lack of any split-screen options is also a lamentable oversight.
More replay value can be found in all the challenging Xbox Live achievements, like trying to not lose a single vessel in any given “age” of Trek—coincidentally or otherwise, it encourages players to be a lot more “Federation” in their tactics than their gamer lizard-brains might otherwise incline. Call it a pack-in bonus.
Yes, the decent Trek games out there are as statistically few and far-between as a pretty Enterprise Yeoman untouched by James Tiberius Kirk — and for the next-gen moment, Star Trek: Legacy is, as the franchise canon holds it, ‘the only ship in the quadrant.’ So for now, it’s the second plasma-screen to the right—and straight on ‘til morning.
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