Review : Star Trek: Legacy
Boldly go, and leave this legacy behind.
by Steven Wong
A Star Trek game that focuses on ship-to-ship combat, contains content from all five-television shows and the real voices of every captain should be a fan's wet dream. Unfortunately, Star Trek Legacy manages to screw things up in almost every way.
The story starts in Jonathan Archer's era during the early formation of the Federation. A rogue Vulcan scientist named T'Uerell has discovered a new way to live long and prosper as a Borg Queen. Vulcans live for centuries, leaving room for each starship captain to eventually encounter the Borg Queen at some point in their career. Players command up to four Federation starships, including the signature ones from the respective shows (Enterprise, Voyager and the Defiant). Each wonderfully detailed craft looks great when cruising through the blackness of space. And those details continue as ships take on battle damage, with scorch marks, smoke and broken hulls.
There are a handful of great control schemes out there, dating as far back as Wing Commander IV and Freelancer. Yet, Legacy's developers settled on the worst possible setup, a setup that players must immediately learn without a tutorial.
Simply put, the keyboard directs the ship's movements like a first-person shooter while the mouse moves the camera around (equating the two to a console controller), but this scarcely describes how difficult maneuvering a ship can be. There are keys to select the closest target and another to pursue and move into firing position, but the ship only gives a short chase before it forgets what it's going after. It's also easy to lose sight of foes, since the targeting reticule doesn't properly highlight or track targets. The manual target selection should be as easy as a point-and-click, but instead, players need to move the camera around until an enemy happens to fall into a fixed set of crosshairs. One minute, players chase ships, and the next, they run headlong toward an absurdly disproportioned planet. There's supposed to be a way to target subsystems such as engines and weapons, but this feature doesn't work. Star Trek Legacy doesn't even realize it takes place in outer space, since ships are incapable of making loops, moving in reverse, slingshotting with a planet's gravity or strafing sideways using inertia. Ships fire phasers in a 360-degree horizontal radius and launch torpedoes from forward or rear tubes, but become useless when enemies fly directly above or below them.
Unfortunately, the pain doesn't end with the controls. Many of Legacy's missions are sadistically difficult, and there's no option to save anywhere. Failure requires players to start all over again, and some of the missions are extremely long. Situations get bad as early as the second mission, where waves of Romulan ships come pouring in, barely leaving players a chance to catch their breaths and recover from damage. In one mission, Kirk hijacks a prototype Klingon ship to infiltrate the enemy. However, the game neglects to inform the player how to turn on the cloak. Another mission keeps players warping around, shooting giant asteroids so they won't hit inhabited planets -- because nothing embodies the prestige of being a Federation starship captain like blasting rocks..
It's usually easier to direct ships using a the top-down map and play Legacy as though it were a strategy game instead of a shooter, but the missions demand results that are nearly impossible from a handful of ships. A good deal of effort is needed to bring down one foe, so it's very easy for players to be overwhelmed. Throw in a space station or two, each with heavy turrets and shields, and players get repeatedly clobbered. With no mission briefings, plays can't make intelligent choices between fast, lightly armed scouts and high-powered battleships when assembling a group. The ship selection screen is surprisingly uninspired and there's no way to improve them. Players can't equip Next Generation Battleships with quantum torpedoes, nor is Voyager equipped with multiphasic shields. The vast majority of the ships are almost identical to each other.
Using the actual actors' voices adds much to ambience. William Shatner plays his role with great melodrama, even though he sounds old and worn out. Luckily, one part of his storyline takes place near the end of Kirk's career as an Admiral. On the negative side, players only hear, but never see their favorite captains. That wouldn't be so bad if the audio quality were consistent and good. Janeway's (Kate Mulgrew) voice is muffled with static, as though it was recorded over the phone.
Star Trek Legacy potential embodied the awe and excitement of the Star Trek franchise. Instead, it's an awful and uninspired space sim. Occasionally, a line of dialogue that sparks an "I remember that episode!" moment, and as stated, the ships look great, but it's not enough. The best way to preserve the Star Trek legacy is to completely skip this game.
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