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.

Once you move your fleet to an enemy area, you have a choice of three battle modes. You can pick instant which causes the computer to automatically show you the outcome of the fight. This kinda ruins the only fun aspect of this game, and you’ll never use it. If you’re up against automated defenses and nothing else you use the simulated battle in which you’re ship icons shoot at the enemy icons kind of representing the battle taking place. This is a time saver but does cause more damage to your ships. In this mode, you can select a neutral stance, aggressive stance, or defensive stance, none of which makes a notable difference. The only real mode you’ll want to go into is arcade mode in which you take command of one of your ships, and duke it out with the enemy. First you get to see a load screen giving you information about the system in which you are fighting. Then you get to see a neat little cinematic of the attacking fleet, whether your own or an enemy’s, then you find yourself flying your most powerful ship, whichever it may be, and your six comrades scatter to meet the enemy threat. Now the arcade mode is a lot of fun, but it also has a lot of unnecessary problems. One of the main ones is that it’s ridiculously easy if you know what you are doing. All you have to do to win any engagement is order your other ships into a formation with you, aim at an enemy, and fire everything you got. You can destroy most defense turrets with a single volley. It is far more fun to fly around on your own and fight, but this too has problems. The main one being the AI controlling your ships is retarded and will almost certainly get themselves killed. The other main issue is that, unless you are a dreadnaught fighting a bunch of scouts, the enemy will focus on your ship and gang-rape you. Perhaps the biggest issue with the AI in this game is how predictable it is. Dreadnaughts will always go for an advanced star base first, then enemy dreadnaughts, then turrets. And while they are fighting those targets, they like to stop dead and just sit there like a star base while everything around them shoots at them. Your scouts will go for the enemy mining colony/research base which has no defenses other than the automated turrets, and after they waste their time destroying that, they’ll attack the turrets. It would be far easier if you could issue more complex commands to your AI controlled ships such as assigning them to attack specific targets, or to cover you, or anything like that. A dreadnaught could destroy a scout with a single volley, but they just ignore enemy ships while the dreadnaught shoot a star base and the enemy ships pick away at their shields. And that brings up another issue: the controls.

During arcade mode, your ship is in a constant forward motion. You can’t stop, but the enemy can. This can be a royal pain when you are trying to hammer away at a section of the enemy’s shields but you have to keep repositioning yourself or you’ll fly past them. If that wasn’t annoying enough, you also have to deal with your targeting. While fighting, you use one analog stick to move, and the other to aim a highlighted cone which directs your fire. The trouble is that this cone will turn off after a brief moment of inactivity, and you won’t be able to fire your weapons until you bring it back up. I have no idea why this is necessary. It would be far easier if the cone was always on so you didn’t have to focus on it so much. And even if you are directing the cone at someone, your weapons can still miss! And speaking of weapons, the only good ones are the Federation phasers. They fire a beam that almost always hits, though they are pretty weak. Every other playable race in conquest mode fires a burst which you have to be right next to your enemy to actually hit them with. The torpedoes can be directed with your targeting cone, but they don’t do much damage, and they take a long time to recharge, so the entire fight you are either saving up your energy while positioning yourself close enough to actually hit them, or you are firing weak shots like crazy.

Another problem is the camera. During arcade mode, it’s an overhead view that zooms out a little more when the enemy is in range of your weapons even if they are still off screen, but you can’t adjust the distance yourself. I would love to be able to zoom in real close and get a better view of the ship you are piloting, but it just doesn’t happen. What does happen are repetitive battles against stationary star bases which become a pain to deal with because you only have three fleets with which to defend your territory, and attack the enemy with, so you will spend a lot of time taking a neighboring system only to retreat again because you left yourself vulnerable. It’s a lot of back and forth as you research the upgrades and gain experience for your generals to increase their attack, defense, and speed. And what is your reward for doing all this? A little spinning icon of your race and some guy saying, “you’ve won.” no cinematic, no clip from the shows. If it’s your first time beating the game with that race you will unlock an area to fight in or a race to fight with in skirmish mode, but that’s it. The game isn’t even two player, so you and your buddy can’t settle your argument about who would kick whose but in the Star Trek universe.

The game also has a skirmish mode in which you can customize a battle between you and another race. You even create the enemy fleet. Then you go into arcade mode and fight them, which is a lot of fun for recreating battles from the show. You can defend DS9 with the Defiant against Dominion ships, pit Voyager against a Borg cube, or do your own version of the Kitamer massacre.

Basically this game feels like it was thrown together by some Star Trek geeks who didn’t know much about video games, turning it into a tedious way to blow up star ships. Despite all these flaws, the game is, never the less, addictive. There is something about blowing up Romulan war birds that just keeps you coming back for more. And the explosions and star base destructions are pretty good. Debris from the destroyed instillation can even block some shots. All in all, I would only recommend this game for devout trekies, because anyone who isn’t into the series, probably won’t want to invest the amount of time and frustration that it takes to play through this game.