Star Trek: Bridge Commander Review

Your job as a Captain is to make the right decisions and occasionally manually fire at the enemy. To that respect, it would've been much nicer if the enemy Captain knew a bit more about tactical combat. But even with these drawbacks, the combat is still appealing and most importantly intense enough to hold your attention. You'll have to teach yourself how to multi-task (yeah, kind of like Windows) and learn how to take care of technical, as well as the tactical aspect of the battle, or you won't last long. Damn and I thought all Captain Picard had to do was say "make it so" and the smarty men, women, aliens and computers would do the rest. Maybe Federation should license Win XP and let it control the vessels? Nah, I don't think so... It would be a nightmarish task to take care of all the security holes in Win XP :)

The story of Bridge Commander begins with a supernova. While on duty in a remote area of space, a nearby sun suddenly erupts releasing a deadly blast that damages your ship, kills your Captain and threatens nearby colonists. Now you must take control of your ship and lead your crew to solve the mystery. Your mission is clear -- discover the cause of the devastating explosion and prevent it from happening again. During the race you will battle the Cardassians, ally with the Klingons, investigate the unpredictable Romulans and reveal a secret plot that threatens the Federation itself. Yeah, you've guessed it. A new and deadly race is bent on gaining absolute power, and it's on the goody-goody Federation guys, ga... ah, you know...to win the day.

The plot is rather mediocre by the TV series standards, but it's good enough to keep you playing. At first, the plot is rather linear, but there are some rather interesting choices to be made later on in the game. Naturally, this adds even more appeal to Bridge Commander and should keep you glued to your screen until the Federation is in the clear. My only objection in regards to the plot and its pace is the vast number of repetitive and boring actions that you need to undertake if you by any chance fail the mission. Bridge Commander is mission-based, and one glitch will have you reading that 'game over' message on your screen. This means that you'll have to do the whole thing all over again, and that usually involves scanning some boring ass stellar debris or something like that. Doing tedious chores time and again kind of kills the initial excitement about the mission if you know what I mean.

I have already mentioned that the voice acting and the musical score is top-notch and that it should help you greatly to get in the Trek spirit. The graphics on the other hand are a mixed bag of blessings. The player models look very nice (Captain Picard and Data look quite believable), but the ship models along with the special effects are lacking. Granted, a lot of intensity in the battles comes from the great shaking-effect and nice sounds when your vessel is hit by a torpedo, or fried by a phaser, but the sight of your ship firing a phaser beam at a Romulan Warbird is not one to behold. Also, the explosions are all done in 2D and look rather unconvincing to say the least. However, STBC is not a FPS, so there's no need to rant about the lack of flashy graphics. This game is all about great design decisions, intuitive interface and a compelling Trek story. My verdict is, Trek fans won't be disappointed -- quite the contrary. Especially those of you who are fans of the Next-Generation universe. STBC is proof that all Star Trek games are not created equal. Some are better than others, and STBC just happens to be one of the better ones.