User Reviews (1 - 11 of 37)

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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.

Does NOT work in Win XP

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 10
Date: December 20, 2004
Author: Amazon User

As I'm unable to "fully" review this game, let me just say, the game is not compatible with WIN XP. If you are lucky (or foolish) enough to still be running Win 98, then you may be able to get the game to load.

PLEASE MAKE IT STOP!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 18
Date: March 21, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This is the worst game ever! They make up weapons and races to try to make a stupid game interesting. It has no relation to The Star Trek Series. The missions are boring, take forever, and then you loose. If you are able to stay awake through a mission the rewards are rather lame. This game is sorry.

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.

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).

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.

Just does not deliver where it needs to

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: August 06, 2001
Author: Amazon User

The problem with Star Trek games is that they try to be too much like Star Trek. Sound confusing? It is. To break the mold, Star Trek producers are going to have to lean on other designs because the way they make their games now just isn't getting it done. I mean, how can one series of games, with all the countless titles, all be so mind-numbingly below average games?

The problem with Starfleet Command is ambition. The game boasts true 3-D combat. This isn't true in the slightest. If you want 3-D space combat, go buy Homeworld. Starfleet command is on two axi, the X and Y. No mention whatsoever of the Z axis. Everything is played on a flat plane. Now, I'm no expert of space travel, but this just isn't accurate, nor does it make for an enjoyable experience.

Don't expect to use your torpedoes with this game either. They miss almost every time you launch them. And it isn't because of anything you're doing wrong: they just miss. The game is also very hard to figure out in its ship setup stage. If you want to load certain shuttles on your ship, you actually have to tell the game to NOT load them to get them to be there. It is backwards thinking, and I cannot believe that they shipped the game with errors in the interface like this.

Overall, it isn't terribly bad, but is not very good either. It is better than 2 stars but not quite at 3 stars either. I'd rate it 50%. It has some nice features, such as being able to command a starship and be in charge of every feature of that ship, but you soon find that, with the absense of hotkeys for most parts of the ship, this game turns into a micromanagement simulation when you don't have time to micromanage because you're being shot at. The AI is generally dumb in the game when they are isolated, but some missions can be near impossible, and combine that with the fact that your "wingmen" do not do anything helpful, it can be very frustrating when trying to destroy over 30 Orion Pirate ships in one certain Federation mission. That's just it: some missions are impossible to beat, and the strategy guide does not help in the slightest.

To make a long story short, I played this game for about 10 days, then uninstalled it on my hard drive and sold it in an online auction. The game just does not deliver what it should for what a starship combat simulation should.

Command a Starship and Grow Old Doing It

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: May 28, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I really want to know who it is out there who seems to think that because you slap a recognizable name like Star Trek on a product and sell it is all one has to do. I also want to know how it is that two completely separate game companies, Interplay and Activision, can produce two separate games (Starfleet Command and Star Trek: Armada) that work almost the same and reek of the same shoddy workmanship. It is products like these that make me realize why I have abandoned Star Trek fandom in the first place. Because like Deep Space Nine and Voyager, they are so lacking in the creativity that made the franchise so worthwhile in the first place.

Starfleet Command-a space combat game by Interplay (Quicksilver), is so bereft intuitive control that it becomes a laborious task to make any ship you control do anything useful. Case in point, in my first mission with my frigate sent after Orion pirates, it took me 15 minutes just to hammer down the enemy ship's shields and constantly fiddling with my ship's weapons systems just to get it to fire at the Orion. Of course while all this is going on my frigate is endless rotating and turning all over the map. Why should it be harder to NOT do something than it is to do something. At least in Armada you can simply drag-and-select your ship(s) and click elsewhere on the map to get them to go there. In Starfleet Command, it takes so long to get your ship to do anything that I was given to wonder why I had to select crew members for my new ship in the first place.

And why, in the year 2000, with all the great computer games out there and the high level of coding in those games, are we still playing so-called 3D space combat games in 2 dimensions? I do not care if they is based on the Starfleet Battles board game, I played that to and realized that it was limitation with it as well. Why is it so hard to work in the 3rd dimension and enable the player to go `Up' or `Down'? We live in a 3 dimensional world and as Homeworld proved, it's easy to control, because the programmers made an interface that was simple and intuitive as well as functional. I am also given to wonder why people are not more critical about products like this when they are so inferior when compared to similar programs. If you comparison shop for a car, why wouldn't you do the same for a piece of software. It isn't like Starfleet Command is the only one of its kind. It is your money afterall.

Just because it has `Star Trek' tacked on to it does not automatically make it good: Remember Star Trek Voyager? Maybe my standards are too high or maybe I shouldn't feel ripped off for spending $... and having the pervasive sense of not getting my money's worth.

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).

A waste of money

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 29, 2001
Author: Amazon User

What were these people thinking? It's yet another pitiful game title from Interplay. It has far too many bugs to be anywhere near enjoyable. All the facts about the ships and weapons is out of date and incorrect. The Interface is also far too complicated. I strongly recommend that you don't buy this game.

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