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Not what it claims to be!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: July 07, 2000
Author: Amazon User

If you want yet another dogfight game, here it is. If you want a game where you feel as though you are commanding a starship, as depicted in the Star Trek movies, you had better pass. Cut scenes? Wow, impressive, and with David Warner no less! Graphics? NONE BETTER! Neat way to blow stuff up? Oh, yea! A great game for those under 30 with cat like reflexes. No cunning needed here. However, you had better be more practised in an immelman turn than the corbomite bluff if you want to suceed at this game, and that precisly is the opposite of what is advertised.

It could have been better

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 10 / 11
Date: August 21, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Its good to see that Christopher Plummer and David Warner decided to reprise their roles as General Chang and Chancellor Gorkon. The cutscenes with them are fantastic with performances that rival the movie. Seeing them alone might make several Star Trek fans want to purchase the game. However, the other actors are not as polished, which may be of some concern to some gamers.

The game allows you to fly eight different Klingon ships with various weapons and power levels for each vessel. This is one of the highlights of the game, as you get to destroy the enemies of the Empire with several cool-looking ships. The enemies of the Empire include the Federation, Romulans, the Gorn, Tholians, and the Shakurians(?). There are about twenty-five missions in the game, so no gamer can really complain about the game being too short. The graphics are good, but it looks a little dated. Maybe this is because the game was over a year late. How sad!

The game does suffer from some bugs. First, the enemy ships have a tendency to try to ram your vessel. This is extremely annoying and frustrating at the same time. This has been a problem for many gamers, and you should be aware of this if you want to purchase the game. Also, you need to be aware that Interplay will no longer offer any support for this game. The design team has been broken up to work on other projects. So if your expecting updated patches and expansion packs then you can simply forget it.

Could have been so much better

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 7 / 25
Date: April 23, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Ok. I admit. I have only played the demo. On that basis though, unless something major is changed on the game play this will not be joining my game collection. I was excited, when I read the game preview in a certain magazine. They claimed thay had cleared up all the problems from 'Starfleet Academy'- 'You are now flying a massive starship, not an x-wing fighter'. Great! So, you can imagine how disappointed I was when I set the game speed to its lowest setting and, yes, you are no longer flying an x-wing, probably more like the Millennium Falcon. The graphics are great. No voice interaction (check out Jane's USAF), how wonderful it would have been to issue commands in either English or Klingon! I hope the final version will be better, but I somehow doubt it.

Well, it's getting better, but......

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: October 26, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This is my second review of this game. I've managed to progress further into it, but still don't think it's a great Trek game. So far, I've made it to the fourth CD with six in all, but it's just too boring and difficult at times. I think they should come out with the Romulan Academy, or maybe even the Borg Academy. I'll keep up with it though. I've made it this far.

Finally getting Star Trek right!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: September 08, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Finally, they're getting Star Trek right. This is a thoroughly enjoyable game, with incredible graphics and wonderful (if not always engrossing) sound. There are a number of significant, but not crippling, flaws which mar an otherwise great game, but for Trekkies and sci-fi sim fans, this is definitely a game to get.

The gameplay here is solid and easy to understand. The designers understand that you're flying a capital ship, not a snub fighter, and the physics reflect that through lethargic turns and gradual accel/decel curves. Even though this may sound like it would lead to slow and boring gameplay, it's anything but. The tension builds and I've found myself squirming, trying to get my targets lined up for that perfect shot--a great feeling of satisifaction when I succeed.

The controls are easy to understand, but slightly cumbersome to use. Though innovate, the VOS (Voice Order System) takes too long to utilize during the middle of the battle. VOS relies on the use of the keypad to issue orders and to distribute power to the ships various systems, and between maneuvering your behemoth mass of destructive power, and then using that power to blast your enemies, you just don't have a third hand to play with shields, weapon charge rates, damage control, and countless other things. Hotkeys are available, scattered through the keyboard, but they are far from intuitive and too numerous to quickly memorize.

The designers tried to compensate by creating Power Macros, and it's a great move. Using the F1-F8 keys, and a control board under the Engineers screen, you can define preset levels for all of your ships systems based on the tactics you plan to employ. Which is fantastic... if the battle goes the way you plan. Still, the Power Macros enable the player to quickly redistribute power during the middle of battle, a vital necessity, but one that looses the need to quickly change small details (like overcharging weapons after you've made your approach under cloak for a devastating first strike.)

The graphics are incredible, with fantastic debris fields and damage representation. Blast a photon torpedo into the enemies hull and see the flames consume the decks. The movies are equally well done, but are prone to stuttering (you'd think they'd have this problem fixed by now.) Yet when the movies do stutter, you don't loose any of the lines, it just keeps repeating until moving out of the trap.

The sound is well done, with quality music and a delightful environmental background during battles, but will occasionally cut out without reason. Other reviewers have had this problem as well, and it just seems to be a problem in need of patching, as reducing the demands on the soundcard make no difference.

The game has also caused the system to freeze up on occasion, and blue screens on exiting are common. All of these bugs are typical of Interplay productions, in my experience, and I got Klingon Academy expecting them to be there in one form or another. And, ironically enough, that's testimony to how good this game is. Despite these problems, it's a great game, and the gameplay isn't seriously affected by these problems.

In summary, there's nothing particularly revolutionary about this game except the fact that they finally got the Star Trek genre right. There's a great feel to the game, and a good plot line to carry you through it. The gameplay is solid and easy to understand, if a little cumbersome during the middle of battle. And the bugs in the most basic of program functionality (ala Interplay's legacy) are really unfortunate as they add frustration to what is otherwise a great experience--I'd have given 4 stars if it weren't for these.

(I'm running on a Pent III 800 Coppermine with 128M RAM at 100Mhz with a Viper V770 32M and SoundBlaster Live! Value.)

A differnt kind of capital ship combat game.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 13 / 14
Date: July 12, 2000
Author: Amazon User

There are two versions of "capital" ship combat in space. In one the starship is treated like a large fighter plane. Loops, dives rate of turn, top speed are all critical to the ship's performance in combat (as seen in ST Insurrection). In the second the starships lumber towards one another and slug it out ( as seen in ST Wrath of Khan ). Klingon Academy is the first type of game. Event at its slowest speed setting this is a joystick game where you dog fight in space. If you are looking for slower pace and a more god like perspective on the battle get ST StarFleet Command). If what you are looking for is a fast paced game where you view space through the cockpit window and twist and turn trading shots with your opponents this is an excellent game. The graphics are very good, the performance requirements are not outrageous ( I have an older system and the game works fine even at the higher resolutions ), and the detail and complexity level are there. In fact the control complexity may be a little bit to great for a game where you can't take your eyes off the screen for fear of losing track of where you opponent is at. There is a wealth of controls and systems to use. A detailed command set for controlling you ship, and your squadron (wingmen).

A few design decisions mar an otherwise excellent game. The maximum range of your weapons is around 15k ( you more powerful weapons are shorter ranged ), your speed is on the order of 1kps ( in the faster ships ) that means head on collisions between star ships is a very real problem. Further, given that the ships are very large relative (some ships are up to 1k long ) to there weapons range "accidental" contact in a twisting dog fight happens a lot. ( Purest will complain that I am using metric kilometers not in game units, but this seems to be what the in game units translate too.) Damage from collisions is catastrophic so the propensity for traffic accidents in space is unfortunate. If the weapons had longer range this would be far less of a problem, but the advantage of the extremely good graphics would be lost ( you would end up fighting it out with a little white dot all the time), so the game's designers force you to fight it out up close so you can "see" your opponent very well. This was better handled ST StarFleet Command in which what you "see" are "icons" that are "larger" than the ship they represent. This allows two icons to "pass through" one another maintaining the ability to see large ship model without imposing collisions resulting from point blank range combat.

Space is very large, and this is handled very well with in system Warp maneuvers to cut down on flying time. On the whole the "realism" of handling large distances, large ships, and weapons ranges falls between Independence War and the Star Wars X-Wings games. The game includes a limited set of tutorial missions to get you started ( it is a training academy after all ), and seems stable right out of the box. All in all an interesting take on the starship combat genre.

Very good Klingon combat game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: February 15, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Klingon Academy is essentially a ship-to-ship combat game set in the Klingon Empire during the period immediately preceding the ST film "The Undiscovered Country". The graphics are very good for a game of this vintage (2000), and the atmosphere is very Klingon. The cinematics and animations are excellent, many of them consisting of extended film sequences featuring Christopher Plummer (the actor who played General Chang in the aforementioned film). The game doesn't contain as many options as later titles, but in exchange for that you get the only game that really lets you be a Klingon (instead of pretending to fly a Klingon ship in simulation, which other ST combat titles generally have you do). In some ways, the game feels like a predecessor to "Bridge Commander" because much of your ordering and functioning is funnelled through your bridge crew.

Fair warning that the game is very hard if you try to do everything manually -- the ship is hard to fly using the keyboard or a mouse. Perhaps in a concession to this, the game features a tactical "gunnery chair" option whereby you can order your helmsman to handle the flying while you concentrate on targeting and shooting -- and the chair sight follows the target by swinging around so that you can target well from weapons banks at various arcs (often not very useful, actually, in many Klingon ship designs where the weapon distribution is very, um, "top-heavy" towards the front of the ship).

In all, a very entertaining, at times very challenging, game. Not up to the level of the more recent combat titles, but still very entertaining indeed.

Another fighter game, not as good as it could be but OK

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 11
Date: July 14, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Please read all the way through not just the beginning and then plz. VOTE if this review was helpful

i'll try to give you an idea what kind of a game this is so here we go!

This is merely another Fighter Space Combat sim, and not so great either, although the graphics are pretty smooth and good, the design of the game isn't good at all! what i would be hoping for as a captain is that you would be sitting in the chair and could say something and see a Klingon Operation officer walk to the operation system and do what you told him to do or you could walk around the ship!

if you like fighter games, you won't love this one although it is fun it's also very hard considering other fighter games the ships move slow but the textures of the ships are great, the weapons are fantastic and the control system is pretty cool, but more problems in this game, as you see in the opening scene, Chang sit's in the captains chair and orders an officer to beem him aboard an enemy ship, this is a feature i would like to have in this game! so what i'm saying is that i think you should have complete control over you and your actions, you the player would be you and could walk around the ship, go to sickbay or monitor repairments of the Warp Core,

pls vote now, weather this review helped u , not weather you liked it! Thank you

many things in this game are great, but the idea is not as good, so i give it 4 STARS mainly based on the looks, but seriously i think they could have made a much better game!

Great game - but download the patch

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: January 17, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This game is alot of fun to play and unlike "Starfleet Academy", your ship does not move like a fighter and you really do command your ship like it is a large spacecraft. The damage effects are great! You can poke holes in the enemy's hull, knock out crucial subsystems and blow off warp nacelles.

The single player campaign is OK but it is not that rigid. It will allow you to make bad command decisions and still finish the missions. I spend alot of time playing with the Quick Battle simulator. This is where you can command any ship, pick your opponents and choose your battle environment which is really alot of fun. I enjoy luring Klingon warships into a planetary ring to watch them bounce off of the ring's ice boulders while trying to attack my starship!

Remember, KA is a Star Trek game, so you know it's going to have bugs. If you do not install the latest patch the game will freeze during heavy battles. This is bad since the game AI will constantly be playing "bumper cars" when it starts to lose a fight. If the enemy ship is smaller than the vessel that you are commanding, then this is more annoying than fatal.

One of the best

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: May 02, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Several reasons why this game is one of the best Capital Ship combat sims out there

1.You can regulate virtualy every aspect of your ships(tractor, transporter, warp, sickbay, engineering, etc)

2.It feels like a Starship-to-Starship simulator (unlike ST:Invasion for PS which completely clashes with the Trek philosophy by offering a poor fighter-to-fighter sim)

3.It is so hugely detailed, you can blow major sections off of any ship and see the different decks, fire on the warp engines and watch the plasma drain away as they lose warp capability(personal favorite). There is an outside view where you can see your ship in great detail

4.There are so many different types of enviornments (deep space(duh),nebula, Gas giants, M-Class worlds, solar coronas, the perimiter of a black hole, etc)

5. New ships. There plenty of new ships for the Klingons, Starfleet, and the Romulans. There are a few new races as well.

The list goes on

If you are wondering why I gave it 4 instead of 5 stars, it's because the events take place in the days of The Original Series and not like the times of the "present day" Star Trek. But this game is so great and at such a low price, you cant loose. It was designed to use the joystick in conjunction with the keyboard. Make sure you have a good joystick though(the game plays horribly with a mouse)

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