Star Trek: Bridge Commander

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!!!

The Good
Being able to control the ship by myself (which I actually prefer) or by computer, limiting the player's role to giving orders The Star Trek feel One can modify the game easily, there are plenty of mods and total conversions on-line Being able to choose exactly where to hit the enemy - you can choose which subsystems of enemy vessel to shoot, or let the computer do it for you Creating great space battles consisting of many ships on both sides

The Bad
Too linear plot in the campaign mode When trying to pass another ship very close usually both ships explode although you can see there's plenty of space between them Not being able to command a fleet or at least set up some tactics with allied ships

The Bottom Line
It's like Sea Dogs in the Star Trek Universe - nothing special, but still you can play it for months without being bored with it! If you ever wanted to feel like a starship captain - certainly it's a must have.

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.