Review

Although it may be hard to believe, but we currently exist in a world without Star Trek. From 1987 to 2005 we enjoyed (or endured) the adventures of four Captains, four crews and four starships but then everything went quiet. Now as we await the arrival of the reboot courtesy of Lost’s J.J. Abrams we get a game celebrating the voyage so far in what promises to be the ultimate Star Trek game.

This is not exactly a bold claim: apart from a brace of enjoyable but tenuous Elite Force titles, gaming has not generally been kind to the fans. Star Trek: Legacy’s most obvious point of reference is the opening battle from First Contact with a number of Starship’s taking on a Borg cube. Only imagine that with you coordinating the attack and then imagine what taking your fleet online and battling against human opponents would be like.

Every ship from every series, including some that only appeared in a single episode, have been faithfully recreated for you to control but away from the ships themselves the graphics are more than a little bland. This isn’t really the fault of the game, more a common problem for any game set in space, so it’s perhaps a little unfair to penalise it for this. Especially as it’s more than good enough to please Trekkies, despite the fact that Voyager’s engines don’t rise before engaging Warp!

The problems begin with the controls, which tries to condense all the keyboard controls you’d associate with a PC onto your Xbox 360 joypad. The overly fiddly layout takes too long to learn and I kept engaging the Warp engines when all I wanted to do was lock onto a target. Also, I when controlling a small fleet I’d find one of my ships sitting miles away in space when it should have been attacking an enemy. This is especially grating when you lose an online confrontation due to control issues.

While on the subject of online modes: while the number of options and games is decent, there’s a very poor balance between the races on offer. Choosing to play as the Borg gives you an overwhelming advantage over everyone else that we’d imagine a “no borg” option should have been included when setting up a game. However, due to a lack of interesting weaponry I can’t see this being more than an interesting curiosity.

Compared to other Star Trek games this comes out favourably, but it’s hard to recommend it to anyone apart from fans of the series who will get a kick out of seeing all the Starships and hearing the correct voices for a change.

About the Review

Platform

Microsoft Xbox 360

Developer

Mad Doc Software

Publisher

Bethesda Softworks

Released

22nd December 2006