Star Trek Legacy Review
After a long and arduous release I finally got to sit down and play Star Trek Legacy. For the most part it’s a very competent enjoyable game with a large number of small faults that add up and to some degree ruin what could have been a much better game.
The gameplay in Star Trek Legacy is nicely paced, it isn’t as fast as games like Ace Combat, but it doesn’t have the slow methodical pace of a typical strategy game either, unfortunately the game’s instruction manual actually happens to leave out a few controls, making it difficult to get yourself over the steep learning curve. Fortunately though, when you finally do figure things out the game becomes a lot more enjoyable and you’ll find your actions feeling a lot more deliberate. It really does take some time though to figure out the best strategy, which can be frustrating due to the lack of save points in any of the levels.
You’ll often spend upwards of 20 or 30 minutes the first time trying a mission only to fail near the end and have to restart, some of the missions can be particularly frustrating as you’ll find yourself helplessly trying to protect multiple ships from multiple groups of enemies all over the map, running into glitches where your warp drive won’t work. For every unenjoyable mission there is a nice well designed fun mission waiting around the corner, which for me would have added longevity to the game, except that even after completing the game there is unfortunately no mission select. Forcing you to play through every single level all over again, rather then simply select that awesome Deep Space Nine mission with all the action. A small oversight that would have made a huge difference for me. Either way the game would have been helped quite a bit by the inclusion of mid-level checkpoints, and a mission select.
The online play can be enjoyable as well, it lets you select a number of different races from the Star Trek Universe in case you’re sick of playing as the Federation from the single player campaign. Unfortunately though in games with even as little as 4 people you can be met with a significant amount of lag, which in turn kind of ruins the experience. There is some nice cooperative play online allowing you to set up skirmishes (where I had the most fun), if you try hard enough you can recreate the ending of Star Trek VI with your friends and double up on a Klingon cruiser with some of the Original Series Star Trek ships.
The graphics in the game are ok, unfortunately no actual player models were created for the game so all the cut scenes where any character happens to be speaking you end up staring blankly at your ship rather then a character model or even a photograph of the actor. Speaking of which, all 5 captains reprised their roles and did some voice over work for this game, the quality is pretty inconsistent though, and Captain Kirk ends up sounding…well like he’s William Shatner from 2006 (old). The story isn’t great, but it’s interesting enough and ties together all the different era’s well enough to justify having them all in the same game.
I’d recommend this game to any hardcore Star Trek fan for sure, as you’ll likely have the proper motivation to make it past some of the more frustrating moments in the game, as for typical space/flight combat fans, I’d probably suggest avoiding it.