Star Trek: Bridge Commander

The Good
In my opinion this is the best Star Trek game to come out since 25th anniversary. No other Trek game could you take command of a starship and wreak havoc on a massive scale. The ship models looked fantastic, and the game created a wonderful sense of scale. The first time you see star base 12 really blew me away. The story was quite well done and the casting of Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner really helped that along.

You control your ship by one of two ways. From the bridge barking orders at your (sometimes useless) crew via the mouse, or from a chase view outside the ship using the WSADQE F and X keyboard keys. You will most likely be doing everything in the game from the chase view, as it is very hard to do anything productive from the bridge unfortunately.

The battles were by far the focus of the game and are quite involving. Targeting specific systems on enemy ships while managing your own damage and watching your shield status makes for the ultimate starship battle multitasking experience.

But on to what I consider the best part of this game.... Open source. Yes you could MODIFY any of the ships in the game, also create ships. Fan and computer geeks alike have created TONS of mods and new ships and updated textures.

Of the best of these would have to be Nano FX. This modification took the bland and unimpressive explosion textures and sounds, and turned them into a 3D delight to the ears and eyes.

And the ships! There are literally hundreds of fan created ships available for downloading, you can even download star wars ships. Ever wanted to pit the Enterprise against a super star destroyer? Boo yah.

And of course with new ships come bigger guns. It makes for much more frantic fights when a Warbird is firing continuously pounding the crap outta ya.

The sound FX and music are for the most part acceptable. The sound and music can be changed like anything else. The music creates a Star Trek atmosphere well enough.

The Bad
While the mods do make the game much more than it can be, they mostly only apply to Quick Battle mode; the single player experience becomes buggy and usually unplayable.

I really wanted my Trek game fix to be ultimately satisfied with this game but unfortunately that wasn't the case.

Not being able to save mid mission or skip and cut scenes made the Single player storyline more frustrating than anything, and I really wanted to launch the first officer out of a torpedo tube. Who exactly is in command anyway?

As good as the game can be with added Mods, I can't really judge a game by what fans did to make it better. The stock ships in BC are mostly uninteresting. Pretty much every Federation ship has the same phaser arcs and torpedo layout (sans the Ambassador). My question is why would the state of the art Sovereign not have any rear firing phasers? Bah.

While the music for the most part does the job, I have to say the battle music gets extremely repetitive, and the sounds of battle are pretty bland over all. When a torpedo hits the hull of an enemy ship you expect a little bit more than thud.

The Bottom Line
When this game came out, I was already crying for a sequel. I would definitely recommend this game to any trek fan out there.

Overall a game that could of been so much better than it is, but still stands out as one of the best trek games ever.

The Good
Almost everything - besides, it's not every day you get to sit in the captains chair of Star Trek ships.

I'll go into minor detail: Excellent atmosphere which really re-lives the famous Star Trek feeling from the series and some of the movies, great plot, great voice-acting, good controls, good strategic combat, and overall a well accomplished game.

The Bad
Being a gamer that values freedom, I really think they could have out even more into this Star Trek title - I mean, we got the bridge of a starship; and everything in the game is almost just right to make the new Elite, or 3D StarFlight - imagine if we could go to other systems to trade and explore freely in this Star Trek universe...

But this is not the case; the player is only led trough a certain chain of missions, without any real chance of freedom - sure, there is a skirmish-mode available, but it really don't give much more freedom either - you just get to blow up different ships from various species.

There's also the thing that this is not a game for most action gamers; there's long conversations, and often long periods of waiting in this game, and quite often you find yourself going ahead of the game itself. For me, this is not a problem, as I like such things, but for others, it might be quite annoying at places.

The Bottom Line
Overall though, Star Trek: BC is a good game with lots of sadly unexplored potential; it is not everyones cup of tea, but if you like Star Trek, or better yet, if you like sci-fi (like myself), this is a game I recommend - just don't expect too much; it IS a good game, but it could have been much better (but then again, its a commercial space-game).

So, I give it one thumb up - for a good game with good plot and fairly well accomplished.

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!!!