I got Star Trek Legacy (for PC) a few days ago, and I just finished it tonight (just now, as a matter of fact). It’s an interesting game — a cross between action/shooter and RTS, and it takes you through the Star Trek timeline right from it’s beginnings in Enterprise up through The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, and Voyager, letting you fly pretty much all of the interesting ships throughout (federation, klingon, romulan). That they manage to cover that length of time in a story arc is impressive.
It is an interesting game, to repeat myself. It isn’t great — I wouldn’t call it wonderful. It’s definitely fun, but it’s also a direct port of an X-BOX game, and the limitations of the system and the fact that a PC is not it’s native platform are fairly evident… and the only reason I wouldn’t call it wonderful is because of the limitations of the game (some platform, some contrived).
The graphics are great (if you have a bit of tolerance for clipping), the ships are detailed and have a good damage model, and while I’ve heard that some don’t like it because it is too arcadey; the control structure and speed of the game seemed just right to me. You can spend a great deal of time in the overview, ordering your ships around without specifically watching what any one ship is doing. Likewise, if you so choose, you can spend a great deal of time piloting one of those ships (and having the others follow you), closely controlling target selection. It is a great mix of shooter and RTS, and it’s one of those games that you can drop into for 20 minutes a night.
If I could stop this discussion there, and all the assumptions that you no doubt have were correct, then I would have no quarrel with the game at all and it would be what I would term as a “great” game. Unfortunately, I cannot do that. The limitations upon the game are too large.
For example, the largest fleet you are able to actively control is 4 ships (you access the ships through the number keys 1-4). This makes no sense at all (why stop at 4? Why such a low number? Why not the whole nine yards with dozens of ships forming battlegroups?) at first, until you consider that the game was designed to be played on the X-BOX. What is trivial to do on the computer with so many keys and a mouse would be much more complicated on a system like the X-BOX. Purists may argue that technically you can control more than 4 ships (during the game, you have the opportunity to rescue ships, and if you do they “assign” themselves to one of your ships and tag along — moving with their “master” ship and shooting what it does, etc.) — but I really don’t consider that control — more like henchmen. They’re good for adding firepower but other than that really don’t have a lot of strategic uses.
They make some strange choices, even in your managing of those four ships. The concept of the game is that you command the Enterprise, and usually a vanguard of 3 other ships (forming a battle-group of 4 ships). Yet those ships need to be micro-managed. For example, if a Galaxy-class ship gets shot up badly during a fire-fight, it does not bother to start repairs until you manually select it and tell it to fix itself.
Imagine that for a moment. A captain (presumably a veteran) on the bridge of his Galaxy-class ship, the sparks falling from the ceiling the only illumination in the bridge other than the red-alert siren; the turbolift doors ajar; smoke in the air; and the engineering and science consoles flickering as they struggle to operate.
“Sir, enemy destroyed!” the tactical officer enthusiastically says. “I’ve already signalled the admiral.” (the ships are good about telling you when they have destroyed a target)
The captain then looks around, nods at a job well done, and rearranges himself in the command chair. “Very good, Mr. Wurf. Send the admiral a damage report, and then wait for his orders.”
A moment of silence passes as the Chief Engineer pulls himself together, bleeding lightly from a gash on his head. “I will start repairs,” he mutters dazedly as he reaches for the engineering station controls to dispatch his repair-lackeys.
“Oh nonono,” tuts the Captain. “No rush.” The Chief Engineer’s hand grinds to a halt. “You never know, the admiral might not want us to repair,” the Captain explains with a note of reproach in his voice. Clearly the Chief Engineer is a grave disappointment.
W… T… F…?
Particularly galling is the fact that they do some things so well! For example, the ships are very good about shooting what you tell them to, when you tell them to, and seem to concentrate fire whenever they are able (even if you aren’t there to tell them to do it). They quickly destroy enemies, and they try to work as a team — I can think of many straight-RTS games (not even RTS/shooter mergers like Star Trek Legacy, but full-on strategic RTSes) that don’t have that level of intelligence. How many times do you have a dozen units standing guard that are attacked by 8 other units, and they all seem to pick their own targets rather than the far more efficient route of concentrating their attacks? I don’t have a count, but I know that it’s shamefully high.
Also, the ships model damage fantastically well in this game — over the course of the mission the external hull of the ship transforms from a pristine starship into a pitted, scared, flaming wasteland as fire comes in and scores it. Even after you repair all of a ships systems to full strength, that scarring and pitting doesn’t go away… which makes complete sense, as who the heck would go out to repaint the hull and buff out those scuffs when you’re trying to run down a Romulan Warbird? In addition to that, the ship systems themselves model damage — take any ship in your fleet, get into a firefight with it; and as it gets damaged it starts doing everything worse. It moves slower, it’s weapons systems have less offensive power, etc. It’s great to see that level of detail… and it just gets better as you go into the engineering aspects of the game.
You can allocate power on your ships (albeit in a very simplified way), splitting it between offense, defense, and engines. The system works well, is quick to master, and is convenient enough to be used (you can even select multiple ships, and then your assignments apply to all of them). To take it the extra step further, it really has a noticeable impact… weapons hit harder with extra power to them, and impulse and warp are both improved with power to the engines. I assume the same is true for defence, but to be perfectly honest I never had occassion to transfer energy to shields… weapons always seemed a better choice. 
Honestly, even though it’s simplified, I really think it is a very good implementation. It is the difference between planet management on Master of Orion and Master of Orion II — the difference between choosing general trends and micro-managing everything yourself. For secondary things like that (power management in Star Trek Legacy and planet economic measurement in Master of Orion) I much prefer to set trends and let my lackeys figure out specifics while I concentrate on the core of the game.
… and then they do something like the “repair” fiasco. Ugggh. The Star Trek curse strikes again. As much as I whine about it, though, it’s a small thing, isn’t it? I bet you’re thinking so; and you’re partially right. That by itself isn’t near enough to stop me from playing the game for hours and hours.
The ‘gotcha’ is that you can’t. I beat the entire campaign from start to finish in something like 6-7 hours. I can remember when a friend got Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance for the X-BOX, and we played it through in a day (11-12 hours, if I recollect correctly) and felt righteously ripped off. This, though… this game. Wow. Ridiculous.
I was hoping to play through the Federation campaign, and then do the Klingon, and then the Romulan, and then… nada. The Federation campaign is it, and it is short. There is no more. Which means, of course, that you never play a Romulan ship, and only very rarely do you get to control a Klingon ship when playing single-player. More than slightly miffed at my hopes of another campaign being dashed, I went to the Federation campaign again, hoping to play my favourite missions once again.
Nope. You can either ‘Continue Campaign’ (which means you play the last mission, as that is where your last save point is) or you ‘Start Campaign’ (which means you start over from the beginning). There is no option to play an arbitrary mission that you happened to have liked. Further (I don’t know this, but I’d give good odds on it being true), I bet that if I did choose to start a new game, then the first save point (there is one between each mission) that I encountered would over-write my save point at the end of the game, and then to play the last mission I’d have to play through the entire game again. God help my soul if I felt the need to play a mission in the middle of the game — I’d probably have to start the game from scratch, play right through to it, then play it and very carefully not save the game after I had beaten it, so that I could come back to it and play it again if I wanted. Of course, the very next day I would wake up and want to play the mission before it… who designs these things, and what precisely do they have against their players?!?
There is a skirmish mode that they presumably meant to add a little longevity to the game, but it really doesn’t. The fun thing about the missions was the objectives, and the skirmish mode doesn’t have any of relevance. It just drops you into a fight against a bunch of opponents. That’s all, fight to the death. Boring.
Some might cry out “Oh, but the multiplayer!” Bah. Similar to the skirmish mode, and I simply don’t see human intelligence or skill to be large enough of a factor to make it better. There is no real chance of being surprised, either, as you can hardly modify your ships to be surprising. Oh, look, a Steamrunner-class destroyer. I wonder what that can do?
Oh, wait… the exact same thing as every other Steamrunner-class destroyer. The only reason other games can get away with this sort of thing is that their units have special abilities (i.e. the Hydralisk and the Zergling are two very different units in StarCraft). Attention: you cannot get away with that if all of your units share the exact same attack methods, and the only difference between them is a difference in attack power. There is no depth here, for ship-to-ship combat. I play EVE Online quite a bit, and it has depth in the ship-to-ship combat. This is simply a matter of “the larger ship wins”.
Unless, of course, one of the commanders forgets to tell their zombified Chief Engineers to repair.
No, the only depth that was to this game was the campaign, with it’s missions with interesting objectives. It is too bad that it is so savagely short-lived. The game had so much promise, and did so many things well. It is disappointing that they forgot to put much game in it, after sorting out so many (though not all) of the mechanics so well.
C’est la vie. The Star Trek curse lives on, to ruin games in future days.
