Star Trek: Bridge Commander

aka: STBC
Moby ID: 5920

Description official description

Star Trek: Bridge Commander puts the player in the role of the new captain of the starship USS Dauntless right after the previous captain perished in a sudden and mysterious explosion of the Vesuvi star which wiped out the nearer half of the planets in the system. Narrowly escaping the fallout, the ship is repaired, receives a new first officer and is tasked with investigating the background of the event throughout the region of space referred to as the Maelstrom, encountering other Federation, Klingon, Ferengi, Romulan, and Cardassian ships, as well as a new race known only as the Kessok.

The player can control the ship and its operations by speaking to the relevant personnel (e.g. hailing and moving the ship by talking to ensign LoMar, or managing the ship's power output and repairs by talking to chief engineer Brex), and can do so either from a first-person perspective from the captain's chair or by viewing the ship from the outside. The ship is almost entirely controllable through hotkeys, and its weapons can be fired manually via mouse controls. If the player's ship is joined by other friendly ships, they can be given simple commands.

The singleplayer campaign is split to 8 episodes, each with its own sub-missions, which form a larger storyline. Unlike many other licensed Star Trek games, combat is not the only focus of the game, as there are missions where exploration and assisting endangered colonies and ships is the main objective. A diplomatic decision late in the game affects the circumstances of the finale. Between missions, the player often moves to Starbase 12 for repairs, stocking on torpedoes, and occasionally to receive more delicate assignments.

Aside from the singleplayer campaign, the game has a so-called "Quick Battle" mode where the player can initiate battles using ships, stations and other objects which appeared in the main campaign, and the player can control any ship from the list. This game mode is also available in multiplayer.

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Credits (Windows version)

229 People (188 developers, 41 thanks) · View all

Creative Director
Project Lead
Network & Interface Programming
AI & Sound Programming, Physics & Simulation Programming
3D Graphics Programming
Interface Programming
Character & Bridge Programming, Save/Load Programming
Game System Programming
Lead Game Design
Game Design, Mission Scripting, Story
Art Lead, Environmental Art
Bridge Sets
Ship Art
Character Animations
Art Technician
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 79% (based on 23 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 29 ratings with 8 reviews)

Avoid this game like a warp drive overload.

The Good
First, the graphics were perfect except for the faces (Picard's face looked awful). Second, the sound was crisp.

The Bad
Everything else. Most of the game involves listening to dialouge that gets boring after the first two minutes. The actual gameplay involves "combat" where you target enemies and just aim a phaser at them. More like "turret simulation". When you fire torpedoes, they don't even hit the enemy because you are always facing your opponent and you see where he is relative to the front of your ship on a little monitor. Finally, you can barely control where your ship moves!!! Instead of controlling where you move, there are "movement beacons" that are at various points in space.You choose which one to go to and you choose how fast and you're done. In "stealth" missions, these ways of movement make those missions impossible.

The Bottom Line
Ick, Yuck, retch!!!

Windows · by James Kirk (150) · 2003

Totally Games totally drops the ball on what should have been a classic.

The Good

'Star Trek: Bridge Commander' does a very nice job of recreating the feel of the Star Trek universe. The overall look of the game is very true to the series. You play the part of a nameless (and faceless and voiceless) captain, out to uncover a secret plot to destroy the Federation. Not exactly original, but not the worst story they could have came up with either.

Gameplay takes place either through the first person perspective of the captain on the bridge, or in a much more interesting and useful tactical mode. The tactical mode is a view of your ship from behind, in which you use the W, S, A, and D keys to control movement, and the number keys for throttle. The mouse buttons are used for firing weapons, and the function keys bring up all the various bridge functions. While your tactical officer is competent enough, the only way to really do well in the game is to use the tactical mode almost exclusively. Besides, the bridge models are relatively ugly and blocky, and the lip sync for the characters in the game is abysmal. It's much prettier out in space.

That said, space combat can be fun. The ships handle as you would expect from a big lumbering starship. The ships turn slowly, and don't race around the screen like, say, an X-Wing or a Tie Fighter would, and this is a good thing for this sort of game. When targeting an enemy ship, you have the option to target various subsystems, whether to take out their impulse engines, warp drive, weapons, or what have you. Unfortunately, this works out better in theory than in practice, as most of the time an enemy ship ends up being destroyed before you are able to take out certain subsystems.

**The Bad**

Sadly, the first word that comes to mind when writing about this game is 'boring'. It's painfully boring in fact. For a game in which you are supposed to be in command of a starship, you end up feeling more like an ensign than a captain. As I said earlier, your character has no voice. Presumably this is to make you feel more like the captain yourself, but if you are like me, you don't feel especially comfortable sitting at home alone barking orders at your monitor.

The game offers absolutely no sense of exploration or adventure, which are qualities you would expect from a game based on a TV show about exploration and adventure. But no, not here. In fact, in this game you will be literally led from mission to mission by the hand, told what to do, where to go, how to avoid being detected, etc. There is nothing left for the player to figure out. There is no puzzle solving whatsoever. The game boils down to warping your ship from system to system (again, you can ONLY go where you are told to) and shooting up any bad guys that may be there.

Another irritating feature of the game is your obnoxious first officer. It feels like she is the captain of the ship, not you. She does all the talking to people on the view screen, she issues orders to the crew, she even reprimands YOU when something goes wrong. That leads me to another point. If you make one mistake, the game is over. Starfleet is notified of your ineptitude and you're canned. Does anyone remember Captain Kirk or Captain Picard ever being relieved of duty for one small mistake or failure? It's ridiculous, and makes you feel like the game should be called 'Star Trek: Bridge Peon'.

Unfortunately the problems don't stop there, not by a long shot. The game has two (more) very serious problems, which in my mind ruin the entire experience. The first is the lack of an in-mission save. Some of the missions are very long, and not being able to save during them means that you will have to play some over and over and over again all the way through. That also means replaying all of the mundane tasks such as recharging the battery, scanning the area, orbiting a planet, listening to messages from this or that person, and so on. It's all pretty dull the first time, and nearly unbearable by the fifth or sixth.

This leads me into the other major mistake made by Totally Games. You cannot, under any circumstances, skip a cutscene. So, if you are forced to play the same mission 7 or 8 times (because of a lack of in-mission saves) you will also be forced to watch the same badly acted, poorly lip synced cutscenes 7 or 8 times. To make matters worse, some of them are several minutes long. This is really unforgivable in my opinion, and quickly kills any desire to keep playing what is already a terribly flawed game.

Graphically the game looks pretty nice, but not as nice as many would have you believe. I hear a lot of talk about how this looks just as good as the TV show, and that is just nonsense. The interiors are dull and ugly, and the exteriors tend to be dark and muddy. Though to be fair, the ship models are very well done and have a great amount of detail. It'd just be a lot nicer if I could see them clearly when in tactical mode, instead of having enemies appear as dark shapes against a star field. The absence of an in-game brightness adjustment option is another amateurish oversight.

**The Bottom Line**

Despite a good record, Totally Games really didn't get it right this time out. From the people that brought us such classics as the X-Wing and Tie Fighter series, I would have expected a lot more. Sadly, all the irritating flaws add up to a game-killing problem. It's just not fun, and for the $50 you will spend on it, there are a lot of much better games out there you could buy. Maybe a hardcore Star Trek fan would be able to overlook, or even completely ignore all of the games glaring faults. For anyone who doesn't speak Klingon or own a Starfleet uniform however, I'd stay away from this disaster.

Windows · by Entorphane (337) · 2002

To boldly go where no Trek game has gone before....

The Good
STORY: After a star goes Nova - killing your Captain and wiping out a few planets in a system you are assigned to take his command as Captain and investigate the cause behind this incident. This story was written by D.C Fontana

MENU LAYOUT This is all done in the standard Trek style of orange and dull purple interfaces - it works - a bit cluttered from the added in animations - but it works.

GRAPHICS The opening render is quite ok - untill I had a closer look...firstly Captain Wright looks a lot like the Picard model - with more hair and secondly in the very nice opening credits bit of your ship being repaired one of the engines are floating in mid air. Overall the 3 rendered movies in the game are very well done but lack the polish on them to make them great. No groundbreaking - but serviceable. The ships models are loaded with detail and look very very nice, the textures on the ships are done very well as well and all add to the Trek Movie experence. The bridge is ok, it's not as interesting as detailed as the ships - and I've noticed that there appears to be a few faces missing from parts of the bridge resultining in bits flickering all the time. The people in the crew are not that interesting to look at - you have 2 aliens and 3 humans at your disposal while varied - they are just not that interesting to look at. Also the face animations are done with texture map swapping - so this leads to very bad lip synch as there are only abou 5 different forms of mouth movement. The other characters in the game seem to be all right at first - but as you progress you get the sneaking feeling that the Klingon with the scar across his eye is really just a modified texture of another captain you see. The same applies to the Cardassians - they all appear the same with small differences like greying hair and eye colour. The explosions are a bit dull - they are not bright and colourful but small and bland. One of the more interesting features of this game is the realtime damage - this means that you can bore out holes anywhere on the ship - not just like in the dreadful Klingon Acadamey where it was all preset - but with enough time and paitence you can effectively remove the bridge from a Bird of Prey - and the other half floats off. When a ship is destroyed large chunks are blown out and off so the end is a floating hulk. The phaser effects are ok - there's even an animation of the phasers pre-firing - arcs of energy go around the phaser banks. And the torpedoes look well enough too. The planets and stars are pretty low resolution - a sun looks really cool - untill you get upclose where the wow effect sort of looses it. The nebulae are well done as well. A nice touch is that any light glow - from engines or window lights have their own glow to them - and the ship also has light rippling off them as well. Also the lighting effects are really good in this game - everycurve is lit up. And there is also the Warp Stretch. Overall the graphics are not that bad - they work - but could have been better.

SOUND The voice acting on this game is very good - this game is very story driven and you meet a host of characters from a nervous Fergengi to an insane Cardassian. Patrick Stewart (Picard) and Brent Spiner (Data) lend their voices for a surpriseingly large amount of the game time, and their role works in this story. Multiple affirmative commands and so on have been recorded so you get a bit more that "yes captain" each time an order is confirmed. The weapon sounds aare good - I cannot comment on if they are true to the TV series as I have never seen a Trek episode - but they are effective. The sound quality seems a little low - even on EAX setting. The music is very well done - a good Trek feel to it - the music also changes depending on the situation - but with a little jarring - not smooth and perfect though. Overall the sound really adds to the atmosphere and a great job has been done on this game in terms of sound.

GAMEPLAY A mixed bag. This is an interesting approach - normally a player does all the work -but in this game you command others to do all the work for you -this works very well. You use the mouse to center on an officer - a small display tells you who they are and what they are doing then you click on them to do percise orders. The strategy in this game lies in subsystems on the ships - a subsystem is something like an engine or shield generator. By destroying one of these systems you hinder the opponents ship - they do the same to you. Another strategy feature is power management - by allocating more power to your systems your ship can preform better. If your warp core is hit then you can only allocate so much power to the systems. The battles between enemy ships are long, these are 40,000,000 ton starships - not zippy starfighters so a battle is like a fight against two slow moving giants. This means it's a fight to see who can deal the most damage to the opponent's ship A.S.A.P. This all works very well as you are balancing shield power - weapon power and repairs all in the midst of battle. The game focus mainly on battle so 75% of the game involves you attacking another starship. The other parts of the game involve ferrying supplies or sneaking about - there are also a few missions where you are leading a large scale assualt on enemy bases. Overall the gameplay is varied and has a good enough plot to keep you interested -there's enough combat related happenings to keep you on your toes - or screaming in fustration.

The Bad
The fact that this is mainly a mouse game - though keyboard commands are there means that there's a lot of clicking - and in the heat of a battle it is very possible to misclick a button and have your tatical stop everything - or another misclick might deselect a crewmember. The buttons are a bit on the small and fiddly size. Also the game does not allow you to create much of a personality for yourself. Your second in command does all the talking. Also the game is very linear - there are a few moments where you can choose to do things - but apart from that it's mostly follow their commands or fail the mission. Failing missions are another annoying aspect I noticed in one mission that a shuttle accidently killed it's self by going into a planet - for some odd reason I was relieved of Command and the game ended. Apart from the strange gameplay niggles the game still stands ok.

The Bottom Line
What really let this game down is that it's meant for Star Trek fans alone. While a non Star Trek fan like myself can enjoy it - we would not take it in with as much enthusiasim as the fans would. And I can say most fans would go nuts for Chrome Dome Picard to help them in their first mission. A good game - far better than most of the other Trek games - but still needs a little bit of ironing to become a great.

Windows · by Sam Hardy (80) · 2002

[ View all 8 player reviews ]

Trivia

If you click on Brex several times in a row, he will say some amusing things.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Kartanym.

Additional contributors: Apogee IV, Erik Novales, Independent, Plok.

Game added March 8, 2002. Last modified October 11, 2023.