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Good idea, Bad execution

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 11
Date: November 12, 1999
Author: Amazon User

The idea behind this game is spectacular. Get a fleet of ships or even a single ship, control it, kill stuff, whatever. A true Capitol Ship Combat game. This is not. Maybe its supposed to be. The controls are hard to figure, the instructions read like something from a TechEngineer, and it has more bugs than an ant hill. Example: going into combat, no damage, red alert, etc. MY WEAPONS WON'T FIRE! Or better yet, I take a hit reported to be only sheild damage, no hull damage, then I try to make a high-speed turn so I can fire back, AND ALL SYSTEMS FAIL! Not to mention, I still can't tell the other ships what to do except "attack at will" or "run away". Even after following the instructions, letter by letter! Good idea for a game, but almost a waste of money. But the graphics are spectacular! Try again Interplay! But next time, try a game that doesn't need 6 fix d/l's 3 weeks after release.

Star Trek for the person that is beyond just shoot em up.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: November 13, 1999
Author: Amazon User

I have played for hours. You have high tech controls. This game is intense. You must practice and learn. Its worth every dime..

A Solid Re-Creation of the RPG Classic

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: November 17, 1999
Author: Amazon User

I spent many hours playing the old Star Fleet Battles board game. It was fun and fascinating, requiring tremendous strategy and most of all, patience. Patience is required to READ THE BOOK before playing. And yes, none of us likes to do that. If you think the book with the CD is thick -- you should've seen the old one! It was over 240 pages *(8 x 11 all small type) and that doesn't include all of the addendums and errata!If you are a fan of the game. Buy it! In fact, I am a Mac user (have 4) and bought a Compaq PC solely for the purpose of playing the game.

If you want to be Kirk or Picard, this is THE game to have!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 11 / 13
Date: November 18, 1999
Author: Amazon User

This game is masterful in its conversion of the boardgame Star Fleet Battles (SFB) to the computer. It utilizes almost every aspect of the computer's capabilities to perfection. This game is a MUST HAVE for any fan of SFB or any Star Trek fan! As an original trekkie and 20 year veteran of SFB, I believe this is the best Trek game ever! However, be warned that the learning curve is incredibly steep for anyone who is not a veteran of SFB. The tutorials are very good at teaching the fundamentals of starship command AND essential. The graphics and special effects are excellent! The interface, although not intuitive, is highly conducive to good game play once you learn it. The sound track is really the only area of deficiency, and should have been better, given all of the Star Trek music that is available plus whatever was composed for the game.

Beautiful!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 13
Date: November 21, 1999
Author: Amazon User

This is the most awesome Star Trek game ever made! It is really cool to be able to control a massive starship, and the graphics are perfect. BUY THIS GAME! It is very straightforward, and the AI is killer!

Falls short of expectations

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: November 30, 1999
Author: Amazon User

The game is incredibly detailed, the graphics are incredible, and the AI is solid (hence the 2 stars) but the interface has far too many buttons to control in the heat of battle. Couple this with an underwritten instruction manual (filled mostly with ship specs, all of which are available in game) and you have a rather frustrating adventure ahead of you. But let's talk about the adventure itself. The campaign system is poorly designed, and the control interface falls horribly flat when trying to control more than one ship. At first I thought it was pretty dumb to have a limit of 3 ships (the game is based on Star FLEET Battles, after all) but then after experiencing the frustration of watching your vessels do the opposite of what you intended them to do I understood why the limit was 3 ships. Additionally, the progression of missions in the campaign doesn't seem to follow an interactive approach (i.e. fighting Gorns while stationed on the opposite side of the galaxy), so you never get the sense of the fate of the galaxy hanging in the balance. No, you get a set plot course vastly similar to the Wing Commander games, despite the claims on the packaging. I won't go into detail about vague mission descriptions and abstract victory conditions. I'll wait for an improved sequel (if it ever gets made).

Trek Lover, Game hater.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 10
Date: November 30, 1999
Author: Amazon User

I really anticipated the release of this game, as all Gaming Magazines had rated this game off the charts! After purchasing the game, I went through the tutorials, and read the entire instruction booklet. I found the ship relatively easy to control, and figured out all of the controls fairly easily. The graphics were spectacular! What I didn't like was the boring game play, and graphics glitches, ie. Flying right into a planetkiller, and no damage to your ship. The gameplay was boring because of an excessive lack of a GOOD storyline. Whoopee, Decker's on the loose. That was about it. They could have made the mission briefings 10x better. There basically was none. How about having the capability to go to warp speed. INTERPLAY- TRY COMBINING AN RPG, AND A COMBAT SIM WITH A GOOD STORYLINE AND THE SAME GRAPHICS QUALITY FROM THIS GAME. IT WOULD BE HUGE! Also, I felt there was absolutely ZERO replayability. Overall, I give it a one.

FALLS SHORT OF EXPECTATIONS

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 18 / 21
Date: December 02, 1999
Author: Amazon User

OK, if you never played the SFB board game, you might find this game to be just fine, and it is better than the average sorry#$@ Star Trek title. This was marketed for the SFB audience, however, and here the game is a big disappointment. The worst is multiship control. Your wingmen AI is poor to non-existent. Individual ship control is good to excellent, albeit a bit cumbersome. But it is impossible to control 3 ships at once in the heat of battle and the interface and AI make the simplest commmands to squadron members ineffectual at best. You literally cannot even have your wingmen attack one target while you combat another.

The mission briefings are hopelessly inadequate and you will have to buy the aftermarket strategy guide to have any clue as to what you are expected to do. There does not seem to be much connection between your battlefield success and the campaign game.

The fact that they redid most of the ship visuals is nitpicking after these more serious flaws, but if you are an SFB fan you expect double saucer hulled Gorns with orange triangle insignia and catamaran and trimaran Lyran hulls that don't look like 23rd century vacuum cleaners. And the Hydrans were just completely redone with no similarity to the original.

Despite this, the ship to ship combat works well, and the graphics are marvelous. Even the cloaking device is handled correctly, although this would have been easy to botch up. This product needs a sequel that gets the other parts right.

P.S. Forget playing for the Federation in this game, since the combat algorithm makes photon toredoes miss about 75% of the time.

Nice game. For SFB fans, not enough like the board game.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 12 / 15
Date: December 15, 1999
Author: Amazon User

First, let me sya that I like this game. It is fine 3D space combat sim. What disappointed me, however, is that it was marketed as a computer version of the ever popular "Star Fleet Battled" board game. What dis appointed me was that I was misled: it is a fine game but it is not a computer version of SFB and does not mirror the "beer and pretzels" feel that makes Star Fleet Battles so much fun.

This is basically a well done real-time space combat simulation with the words "Star Trek" in the title. I was expecting a straight "computerization" of Star Fleet Battles. This is what I was led to believe by reading the reviews in the computer games magazines. This kind of conversion has been done successfully before (try a copy of Hasbro Interactive's "Axis and Allies").

I don't really need the memory and processor intensive 3D views and first person perspective. A 2D, top-down view of the game, with a hex grid map, would have been fine. And the "OK, we all move one space, then we all move another space, then we all move another space, etcetera" movement scheme in Star Fleet Battles was great and I was expecting a computer version of that. The real-time movement is fine, but it doesn't really simulate the feel of the board game.

Bottom Line: If you like good 3D space combat simulations, give this game a try. If you wan't the computer version of Star Fleet Battles, you will have to wait some more!

Very Disappointed

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: December 24, 1999
Author: Amazon User

I'm not sure what the game designers were working towards when they designed this game but it reminded me of something you might come across on Sega Genesis (that is to say, low tech and predictable).

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