Star Trek Conquest

This is one of the better Star Trek games out there, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement. In Star Trek conquest you play as one of six alien races from the Star Trek the Next Generation universe and try to rule the galaxy by defeating the other races. Sounds like fun, and in all honesty it is. There is something very addicting about letting loose with the photon torpedoes and blowing up Romulan war birds, but it gets repetitive after awhile due to the lack of variety. I know it seems like a game with six alien races from a franchise as diverse as Star Trek shouldn’t suffer in this area, but ironically it is one of this games biggest flaws.

Each race commands up to three fleets led by one of three generals who are characters from the show, though you may need to be a true nerd to recognize some of them. Each fleet consists of up to seven ships, but here’s the problem, each race has only three classes of ships. You have your cheap, fast scout like a Klingon bird of prey. You have you medium class cruiser like Voyager, and then you have your big bruisers, the dreadnaughts like the Romulan war bird or the Enterprise. At first it’s fun to mix it up, but eventually it’ll just be a bunch of dreadnaughts smashing against each other, and that gets dull really fast. Now they do spice it up a little by throwing you against other enemies in neutral territories like the Ferengi, Xindi and the Borg, but these enemies are far too easy, especially the Borg. I mean they’re the freaking Borg and you can wipe the floor with them in this game. They’re not even a playable race outside the skirmish mode.

Another area that really lacks variety in this game is the buildings. You can build a little star base, or a big star base. If you don’t have a fleet in a system that gets attacked, you can take control of the star base, but you are basically a sitting duck. You can rotate your shields, but the game tends to glitch with this trick. If the enemy ship pounds away at a section of your shields and they fail, you swing your vulnerable spot around to your back so the enemy is now pounding away at a fresh shield section, the area on the opposite side will still take the damage. Star bases are needed to build and repair your ships. They also increase the area you can see through the fog of war in the higher difficulty settings. You then have to decide between a mining colony to increase your money, or a research base to study upgrades and build a special weapon. The last thing you can build are two sets of four automated defense turrets around your base and building. And that’s it, there is nothing else you can build in this game other than one of three special weapons that have various effects. There were so many more things they could have done with Star Trek, but this is all you get. After you have built all of your bases and ships, it’s time for battle.