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)

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

A good game made better by fan content

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.

Windows · by Andrew Wills (2) · 2005

One of the better Star Trek games released - but not for gamers that get easily bored

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.

Windows · by Stargazer (99) · 2003

[ 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.