Rating: Summary: Trek Lover, Game hater. Review: 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.
Rating: Summary: Command a Starship and Grow Old Doing It Review: 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.
Rating: Summary: A Solid Re-Creation of the RPG Classic Review: 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.
Rating: Summary: Interesting Game Review: I thought that this was a pretty exciting game. It has lots of races and ships to choose from and it has really good graphics(if you has the reccomended system requirements. If you only have the basic requiments if runs slow and the graphic are really not as good.) The game ends pretty short if you win about 10 missions in a row. There are also lots of good cheats for this game. You can had lots of power so that you can have everything on your ship up to full. I would recomend it if you like Star Trek.
Rating: Summary: Playtester wishes it was better Review: I was a late addition playtester for this game, winning a spot via a writing contest. Star Fleet Command is based heavily on Star Fleet Battles, a strategic board game put out by Amarillo Design Bureau. I myself am more of an SFB fanatic than a Trekker, and like most SFB players, have been wanting a SFB based computer game for more than 10 years. Star Fleet Command was a noble effort, but it falls short. For myself, I feel it was due to a "rush to market" attitude within the leadership of Interplay. They didn't seem to take the comments of us playtesters seriously, and let most of the bugs we had found and had been screaming about go right into production. It left something of a sour taste in my mouth. As much as I'd like to say this game is the end-all be-all for both Trek fans and SFB fanatics like myself, I can't. It's a mediocre game, falling far short of what it had the potential to be, and by all rights what it should have been. It's OK, but not great.
Rating: Summary: Very Disappointed Review: 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).
Rating: Summary: One of the BEST combat sims for the PC ... Review: If you are into Star Trek buy this game! Out of the box it is entertaining, but search the net for new ship mods and it can become a full fledged hobby. (You can edit the entire game - ships, missions, textures of the weapons...) This is the predecessor of Star Fleet Command 2, but it is basically the same game. Doesn't need a lot of ram to run well and is played with the mouse + keyboard so you don't have to mess around with a joystick. A MUST for diehard Star Trek fans...
Rating: Summary: Good Game...for a while Review: In the past few years, Star Trek games have been getting better. With the release of Starfleet Command, the road to better games starts here. Starfleet Command starts out good with a training mission or two and then goes into actual missions. The addition of Sulu training you is a big plus to this game. However, after playing a few missions, it gets very repetitive in action, despite the changing plots. The graphics are good, but not great. A 3D card really doesn't improve things. While this is one of the better Star Trek games, there isn't much variety to it.
Rating: Summary: FALLS SHORT OF EXPECTATIONS Review: 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.
Rating: Summary: Close, but it's not quite right... Review: Star Trek: Starfleet Command is a great game. I truly enjoyed playing it and the adventure of building a fleet of ships to put together under one command. The races are rendered wonderfully. There is one problem though...this game is definitely a board game from Star Trek with new toys that don't exist added in. I'm someone who wants it all to fit together. I just wish they hadn't added the unnecessary extra stuff to the program. It is still a wonderful game though...and definitely a blast to play with astounding graphics and sounds.
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