Star Trek: Bridge Commander
- Original Release: 2002
- Developer: Totally Games
- Publisher: Activision
- Platform: PC
I have very fond memories of this game, and it’s great playing it again. Bridge Commander puts you in the role of a Galaxy class starship (and later Sovereign) and I think it’s the closest game that brings about the feeling of being a captain of a ship – rather than being the ship itself.
While in the bridge view, you can give commands to your crew – all fully voiced – and they’ll do it for you. As this is a combat orientated game, you’ll mainly be dealing with Lt. Savali, your tactical officer. You can tell him what targets to aim for, set his tactics or let him decide. If you want to, you can play the entire game like this, ordering your crew and never taking manual control. I really love that you can play for it.
If you want to do more yourself, you can do that, too. The external view of the ship enables controls for manual control of the ship, letting you fly around and fire as you prefer. The camera is locked onto the target, letting you move through your different phaser arcs rather than being limited to forward facing weapons like previous space combat games. You also still have access to all the crew and can give commands from this view, so you can continue giving orders and just admire the battles.
Targeting subsytems is a major part of the game. You can target individual components of the ship like cloaking devices, individual phasers, shield generators and the warp core. Missions throughout the game will require use of this, especially when disabling ships and stations. The hull of your target will still take damage, so you need to be careful with what you hit – especially if you then need to defend your disabled target.
The game isn’t without its flaws. I think it could have done with conversation choices, even just ones that don’t change the story, just your own flair on the conversation. It’s a bit odd that the first officer handles all of the conversations. I would also like more options regarding what you can do, as some sections (particularly Science and Engineering) are quite limited. The game is very good at supporting mods, and the community has added a lot of features (along with nicer looking ships) – for this playthough I went with the base game with some minor modifications to make it run at 1080p.
Bridge Commander is an amazing experience for the ship side of Star Trek, and this would be my basis for the “perfect” Star Trek game, which would combine this with Elite Force and a bit of No Man’s Sky for exploration, some mysteries to solve and new things to discover.
Star Trek: Starfleet Command III
- Original Release: 2002
- Developer: Taldren
- Publisher: Interplay
- Platform: PC
While Starfleet Command 2 was very similar to the first game with more features, this one has gone in a different direction, trying to appeal to a wider audience by streamlining the game. It’s now set in the TNG era, with a proper story that takes place across Klingon, Romulan and Federation campaigns.
The “streamlined” features just seem like they’ve removed a lot of features. This does remove a lot of the complication, but it’s also what made the previous games unique. At the same time, they don’t seem to have done much else to make the game appeal to more people, as the game now feels even slower, with less to do due to the removal of these features.
While you had multiple weapon types and a ton of crazy tactics to use against opponents, combat in this game is almost entirely spinning in circles, waiting for your weapon energy to recharge and hitting fire when the fire button lights up. The enemy ships love getting extremely close (although there are no collisions to worry about, ships are on slightly different heights – or just fly through each other) , making it impossible to do anything regarding planning the use of your weapon arcs or aiming at specific enemy shields.
The main campaigns have the map grid from SFC2, but it doesn’t quite make sense. You’re forced to specific locations throughout the campaign. It would have been better if they kept this map specific to the conquest mode (where you can explore and play randomly generated missions). Other nice touches, such as a unique UI for each race, have been removed and there are fewer factions to play as.
People who found the previous games too complex were the target audience for this – people like me. While they weren’t for me, I could understand why people would love those games. This one just comes across as dull.
Star Trek: First Duty
- Original Release: 2002
- Developer: Digital Bridges
- Publisher: Activision
- Platform: WAP
- Not played: No playable builds available
A very early mobile game, made for WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). This is essentially a browser-based game made by people who had a lot of ambition for what mobile phone games could do. First Duty was an adventure game set at Starfleet Academy. You needed to complete a four year training course. I spoke to one of the developers who describe it as a “chose your own path” game.
First Duty was similar to a previous game of theirs called Sorcery!, based on the Steve Jackson book, made as a precursor to their big Star Trek project: Star Trek: Prime Directive.
Star Trek: Nemesis
- Original Release: 2002
- Developer: nGame
- Publisher: Activision
- Platform: Java
This Star Trek: Nemesis tie-in game is a simple game for Java mobile phones set during the final battle of Star Trek: Nemesis. Shinzon, who tells the Enterprise to surrender, is flying to attack Earth and you must stop him.
Some Romulan Valdore-class ships also turn up to help Shinzon. You play though 4 rounds of shooting Romulan ships and defending yourself against the cloaked Scimitar. Once per round you can warp to a nearby starbase for repairs. The fifth round is a battle against the Scimitar itself.
It’s a very slow and simple game, and not much fun.
Star Trek: Voyager: The Arcade Game
- Original Release: 2002
- Developer: Game Refuge
- Publisher: Monaco Entertainment
- Platform: Arcade
- Not played: Could not get game to run in an emulator.
Star Trek: Voyager: The Arcade Game is a light gun arcade game that is very much an arcade light gun game first and a Star Trek game second.
The game is roughly half an hour long, although you can take different routes and see different things. It consists entirely of shooting a massive amount of enemies – mainly Borg of many different shapes and sizes, form spider drones to big hulking monstrosities. You also fight Hirogen and random other enemies (some of the flying ones look a bit like the Etherians from Elite Force), with multiple types at once at the end.
The Voyager crew appear, but the very few voice lines sound like they’ve been badly ripped out of an episode of the show. They spend the entire game running for their lives like complete cowards, leaving you, a completely random ensign who is thinking about starting an elite security squad (not-Hazard team), to save the day. It stars off when the meeting is “rudely interrupted” (those are the actual words the game uses) by The Borg.
This is a very silly (and probably fun in an amusing way) lightgun game that uses the Star Trek license as an outer shell. There are some emulators that can run the game (but with no sound), but I haven’t got them to work on my computers.
Star Trek Customizable Card Game: Second Edition
- Original Release: 2002
- Developer: Decipher
- Publisher: Decipher
- Original Platform: Board Game
When the first Customizable Card Game got too complicated, Decipher decided to make a more streamlined version. The core part of the game is still moving ships to missions to complete them, facing dilemmas on the way, but how you play has been changed.
Instead of the lengthy setup of the 1st Edition (1E), the 2nd Edition (2E) just has you place five of your own missions in a row. These are placed next to each other regardless of what quadrant the card is in (instead of being in a different location, it just adds 2 to the move cost). You also don’t carefully pick dilemmas like in 1E. You have a dilemma deck which is shuffled and then you draw at random when your opponent starts a mission (although you can order them to increase difficulty). The more personnel on the mission, the more dilemmas they face.
Playing card is also different. Instead of playing one a turn, you have seven “credits” each round to spend on playing cards or drawing more, which does speed up the start of the game.
While this version is easier to play, I think it loses a lot of the Star Trek “feel” that 1E had – you’re just completing cards now, not exploring a galaxy.
Star Trek: Prime Directive
- Original Release: Cancelled 2002
- Developer: Digital Bridges
- Publisher: Activision
- Platform: WAP
- Not played: No playable builds available
The main event to the starter of Star Trek: First Duty, this was supposed to be a massively multiplayer mobile game using Wireless Access Protocol (the very early internet of mobile phones). The developers boasted about a persistent universe with ten thousand players per server using Digital Bridges’ “UNITY” system.
The game would have taken place in a new area of unexplored space called the Caledonian Expanse, which the Federation has gained access to via a wormhole appearing in Federation space. The UNITY system would enable players from all over the world to work together, regardless of language spoken.
An open beta was available for a short time in 2002. I spoke to one of the developers of the game who said that people would be able to discover new star systems and name them – similar to No Man’s Sky. It was a very, very ambitious for mobile phones at the time, especially due to the limited capabilities (the developer I spoke to doesn’t think they saved any screenshots as the game wasn’t much to look at),
It ended up getting cancelled as the market for mobile games just wasn’t interested in big, complicated games, and much simpler offline Java games were becoming much more popular, so Digital Bridges moved on to work on those kinds of games instead.
Star Trek: Elite Force II
- Original Release: 2003
- Developer: Ritual
- Publisher: Activision
- Platform: PC
The sequel to Elite Force starts off during the Voyager episode “Endgame”, expanding upon Voyager’s journey through the transwarp hub. A Borg sphere has captured Voyager and the Hazard Team needs to free Voyager before the Borg adapt to their new systems. After Voyager gets home, Munro (who is unfortunately only male in this game – it’s a bit odd when the first game I played as a female Munro) gets stuck teaching at the academy until he impresses Picard, getting assigned to the Enterprise E, which swiftly gets involved in a mystery surrounding some insect-like aliens with organic impulse engines.
While this is developed by a different developer, the feel of the gameplay is the same. You have a mixture of alien and federation weapons again (although far more Federation weapons this game, with machine gun and shotgun versions of the compression rifle). My wish about the first game is answered here: I wanted more Tricorder use and puzzles and this has that. The puzzles aren’t great, though, and are just pipe connecting and waveform matching minigame – I would have preferred puzzles that involved more scanning. The tricorder does have more view modes, pointing out weak walls or bioscanners. My favourite thing about the tricorder is that you can scan a lot of things. All the Federation characters have names (both on the Enterprise and at Starfleet Academy) – even the fish do. It’s a nice little touch, and I just love scanning for lifeforms.
The new insect-like aliens are definitely used well for a gameplay perspective, as they have many different forms that get introduced throughout the game, although at times it feels a bit lonely as you often get separated from your crew (to the point where they lampshade it), who really don’t get enough screen-time. Previous characters like Chang and Chell barely do anything (in the final mission, Chell is shot and beamed back to the Enterprise before you even start) and the new Klingon member, Korban, is not utilised much at all. There’s one mission where you are looking for a Ferengi on a pirate Klingon space station and instead of wearing casual clothing and taking the Klingon member of the team…they go in full Starfleet gear.
Picard also feels a bit lonely. This is set a bit after Nemesis, and everyone has left – even Crusher and La Forge – so it makes sense. The only familiar face he has is Chief Engineer Barclay, with Tuvok (on temporary assignment to the Enterpriser to help integrate the Hazard team). being the only other character from the shows. I don’t have any issues with this, but it would be nice if it felt like Picard had a new crew, but the only developed character is a botanist that you can listen to random conversations (she has no involvement in the plot). Just a named first officer would be enough.
That said, Elite Force 2 is still a great game and the gameplay is extremely enjoyable. Some of the plot is predictable – you can tell one of the villains the moment he speaks in his “overly evil” accent, but other moments provide a nice mystery. The weapons are fun to use again, with some great set pieces to keep the action entertaining.
