Yesterday I finished Star Trek: Legacy on the Xbox 360 (also available on PC). The game is a bit old now (2006) and you can find it used for $15 at GameStop. It took a beating in the reviews when it came out. They ranged from 5/10 to 8/10. Remember, with game reviews anything below an 8/10 is considered shit. The scale pretty much starts at 8. However, I think a lot of people were too harsh. I thoroughly enjoyed the game. I enjoyed it so much that when I brought RE5 home on release day, I actually put in Legacy first and played a stage before I finally opened RE5. Maybe my enjoyment had something to do with how I am literally entrenched in Star Trek right now, watching an episode almost every night. Or maybe also because I played the game on Admiral (hard) difficulty, so it was more challenging than some reviewers had played. But I liked it so much I plan on playing it again and trying for some extra achievements.
The game is technically a Real Time Strategy (RTS). You control up to four federation ships in campaign mode. You start with only one, the Enterprise NX-01. You quickly rescue a second ship and take control of it. The combat is fairly straight forward. You have phasers and photon torpedoes. Phasers works better on shields and photons work better on hulls. You can redirect power to engines, weapons, or shields. You start in the Enterprise era so none of your own ships have shields yet, though your enemies do. There is a tactical map where you can issue orders more easily. The combat is essentially dog fighting. The missions vary from rescue, search and destroy, defense, recon, all kinds of things. No two missions felt the same. The game reminded me a bit of X-Wing, the old PC game. I loved X-Wing. While Legacy is far less complicated than X-Wing, it also means that Legacy is far easier to pick up and play. Legacy is
not a number crunching strategy game. It is by no means a "casual" game, but it is certainly accessible. The strategy is small tactical deployment. You have four ships, a limited resource. Losing one can cost you in future missions. So you try to keep them together, but once in a while you want to send one of your faster ships off alone to achieve an objective while the main fleet defends another. You earn command points with which you can buy new ships. And those command points are restrictive enough that you don't want to lose a single ship if you can help it. I had a TOS era Constitution class ship right until the final stage, which means it was vastly outgunned and under shielded. But it was still very helpful as one more gun and one more target to distract enemy fire. If I had let it be destroyed in a previous mission then I would have been at a big disadvantage.
The game was a great fan service, IMO. They had every captain from every series with the real voices of the actors. Archer, Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway, they're all there. Every version of every ship is there: NX-01, NCC-1701, NCC-1701-A, NCC-1701-D, NCC-1701-E, NCC-74656 (Voyager), NX-74205 (Defiant), and even DS9 makes an appearance. As far as I can tell, it has a complete roster of every Federation ship ever seen on screen. The same is probably true of the Klingon, Romulan, and Borg fleets.
Finally, I'd like to address some of the "problems" of the game, which I think have been greatly exaggerated in other reviews.
- Pizza Box map - The maps are 3D but limited in the Z-axis, resulting in a pizza box shape. Honestly, I see this as a pro, not a con. It keeps the tactical map and the world at large much easier to manage and navigate. A large Z-axis would have just really complicated the UI and had you flying around trying to find things that are a million miles above or below you.
- Flaky Controls - The controls do flake out once in a while. Your camera will suddenly jump 180 degrees, or one of your other ships would suddenly forget the command you gave it. While it would have been nice for these to have been fixed, it by no means ruins the game. The camera jump is harmless, and the lost commands are not very often and you are always monitoring all of your ships (or at least you should be) so you will notice rather quickly that Janeway has suddenly decided to go AWOL and is flying out into space.
- Ship AI does not repair - You are always in direct control of one of your four ships, and the other three will be on AI unless you jump to it. I've read more than one reviewer complain that the AI ships will not conduct repairs no matter how damaged they are. These guys obviously didn't play the game very much. If they did, they would realize that if the AI did enact repairs on its own, it would be suicide. Enacting repairs on any part of the ship redirects a large amount of the ship's power. This means your engines, phasers, and most importantly, your shields will suffer. My guess is these systems lose at least 50% power. This means shields and phaser banks pretty much do not regenerate at all, and your ship is flying at half it's regular impulse speed. That ship is a sitting duck while conducting repairs. If the AI started repairs at the wrong time it would go down in seconds. Repair management is left to the user, and for good reason.
This is not a AAA title, and it seems some reviewers only want to see and play AAA. Well, in my mind, the game has to be first and foremost fun to play. And that automatically makes Star Trek: Legacy better than most of the so called "AAA" titles out there. I loved the game. I think any Star Trek fan with a 360 or PC should play it.
