Trek fans can be fickle things. Some have petitioned for more episodes of Enterprise to be aired on our screens while others, including Gene Roddenberry’s grandson, have petitioned for a positive gay or lesbian character to appear in Voyager. There has even been a petition begging Paramount to stop making spin-offs at all. It’s a Kobyashi Naru-style no-win situation and no doubt that goes for the games too. Some have been half-decent point-and-click adventures, others were first-person beam-’em-ups and one has even taken on Star Wars. Legacy follows on this style of deep space combat but it’s not about dogfighting. It’s about whale fighting. Expect it to be loved, and hated.

For all the genius of the ‘Wagon Train to the stars’, it’s not the Wild West where Star Trek looked for capital ship combat, but the Navy. Legacy provides a story that will see you commanding a fleet of four ships through each of the Trek eras. You start off as Captain Archer in Enterprise with the voice of Scott ‘brows’ Bakula. A story based on conspiracy and time travel will take you through the accurately voiced roles of Captain Kirk, Captain Janeway, Sisko and Picard, and at all times you’re head of a small navy force – and with that, a navy style of fighting. The combat is big and it’s slow and you’re not getting anywhere if you try to fly a Declaration class starship like an XWing fighter.

Commanding three other ships is simple. You can give them destinations on a star map that cover the battle area or they can fly with you in formation; you are also able to swap between each with the tap of a D-button. What really defines the game is how you fight, though. Invariably, this is dependent on the relative positions of your Phaser arrays, your front and aft torpedo bays and your target.

Phasers, or their equivalent, have less of a field of cover than you’d find in a B-17 bomber and to fire torpedoes your target has to be directly in front or behind you. This means that you don’t fly the ship to follow enemies but rather you move your ship to bring your guns to bear. You can swiftly divert energy between shields, engines and weapons and tell engineering to carry out repairs; but to actually fight, you have to shift a monstrous metal whale around, which takes time. This makes ship-to-ship combat a long and considered affair where you think about your energy usage, wait to unleash a full charge and pull desperately to bring your torpedo bays in line while your other ships engage with gusto under their own intelligence. There’s no view from the Bridge either; instead you get to watch battles play out backed with the right music and the right voices. In fact, everything would be wonderfully reminiscent of the space battle from Wrath Of Khan if it were not for a few small yet huge problems within the game.

Your ships are vast, space is vaster, planets are pretty big, but then quite often they’re not. If Kirk flew the Enterprise into a sun at faster-thanlight speed he’d most probably be warped into the past and end up having sex with Cleopatra. We flew into a planet and… nothing. Not a crash, not a klaxon. Nothing. We just bonked off it thus destroying the illusion. It wasn’t a planet any more – it was just a painted basketball and we were in a model kit. When flying in close formation you’ll bonk your other ships, too. And space stations, and Klingon Birds-of-Prey. There’s a genuine thrill in taking a desperate fight into a nebula and feeling dwarfed by the size of the universe, then you bonk into a model and just feel daft.

Of course, the game isn’t just about broadsiding ships like a sneaky pirate and so missions require more of you than just battle skill – you have to conform to mission criteria. These missions break down in a similar style to any classic spaceship-fighting game such as Wing Commander or TIE Fighter, so you’ll be escorting, tracking, scanning planets and shifting around a system countering threats. This helps conform your actions to a narrative, but too often you can work dashed hard for 40 minutes only to be told that the mission has been failed and no one will tell you why. For all the confused yet ignorable scale problems and time it takes you to get used to piloting for full weapon effectiveness, it’s the mission structure that causes most alarm. Such epic combat should take time but when not even a lowly ensign speaks up to tell you that you’re in danger of failure, you will find that space can be a cold and indifferent place in which to play.

Will Johnston