Star Fleet II: Krellan Commander

The Good
Star Fleet II fired my imagination and gave me countless hours of enjoyment the likes of which no game has delivered since. While listed on this site as a turn-based game, it actually utilized a combination of turn-based and realtime play in a way I don't think I've seen attempted in any other game.

SF2:KC offered a great deal of possibilities and presented even more command decisions than its predecessor. The missions on the early ranks were cakewalks, but as the game progressed in difficulty you found yourself responsible for accomplishing more. You would command your battlecruiser (along with four escorts from the second rank onward) in direct confrontation with United Galactic Alliance ships, beam down landing parties to claim unpopulated worlds, bombard populated worlds into Imperial servitude, and even command invasion forces to seize planets with as much of their cities and industry intact as you could manage.

The Bad
Unfortunately, I can't dispute the facts stated in this site's other (negative) review. Star Fleet II was shipped to stores unfinished. Getting the game for Christmas from my parents in '89 I found the space-borne parts of the game to work fine without any of the crashing that others have experienced. However, the entire Orbital Control/Planetary Invasion part of the game hadn't even been implemented yet. I wrote to Interstel about this, and they promised to send me disks for V1.5 as soon as they were ready.

Sometime around March, I believe, I received said disks (indistinguishable from the originals, so I was sure to mark them) and I could now get into Orbital Control and invade planets. This proved an easy task at first, until I tried invading UGA colonies and independent tech level 6 (limited space flight) worlds and found it impossible to win. Maybe the correct tactics and strategies were eluding me, but the sleazeball trick I developed was to beam one cohort of shocktroops down to a city, bring them back up immediately and then bombard the planet into surrender (from Orbital Control). Having had ground troops on the planet, the game counted this as an invasion rather than bombardment bully tactics.

While the game ran much better for me than it did for the first reviewer on our humble 8 Mhz 8088 machine, when the fur started flying (lots of UGA and/or Krellan ships for the game to keep track of, such as when assaulting a Starbase) the game seriously bogged down to the point where my keystrokes didn't register in time to save my ship from fiery death. When we got our 486 DXII 50 Mhz tower in 1993, however, that computer had more than enough horsepower to run Star Fleet II without aggravation.

The Bottom Line
Star Fleet II: Krellan Commander was an amazing game to my fourteen year old self, and remained fun every time I reinstalled it, most recently about three years ago. It's a very noble attempt to bring space opera to a computer strategy/RPG game, but as the other review indicates, this game had serious developmental flaws, and it's not surprising that it killed Interstel.

Whether you're blowing UGA ships to smithereens, capturing them, torturing and executing the passengers of a starliner or invading a medium-nuclear tech level world this game is loads of fun. I'd still love to see, all these years later, Dr. Sorenson take a crack at Star Fleet III: Zaldron Commander (cloaking devices, baby!) or giving us command of a UGA Heavy Cruiser with the Star Fleet II engine. Given the way SF2 flopped, though, I think we're more likely to catch Michael Moore and Ann Coulter in bed together than we are to see anything new in the Star Fleet franchise.