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The history of Star Trek games is a lesson in both agony and ecstasy. History is littered with grand Trek epics such as the classic Simon and Schuster text adventures and the more recent Bridge Commander, which is arguably the best Trek game of all time. Then there are the disasters, such as the ambitious but ill-designed Star Trek: Shattered Universe and the engaging but bug-infested Starfleet Command series. On top of all that, fans of Trek (Trekkies or Trekkers, take your pick) have often had to endure painful, lengthy legal wrangling between CBS / Paramount and the various gaming companies who have developed for the series. It does not help, either, that most Trek adaptations on consoles have been unmitigated disasters. Star Trek Conquest is a game that should, by all rights, be a watershed moment for fans, especially given that the developer is Bethesda Softworks, the bright minds behind the Elder Scrolls. Sadly, this game winds up being one of the shortest, most shallow Star Trek games ever made. visuals The visual look of the game is passable but certainly not top-notch. Ship designs are true to the franchise, as are weapons, but most of it is viewed at a distance. There are some serious slowdown issues that occur when a large number of ships are on the screen with a starbase at the same time, and at least once we had the game lock up entirely, forcing a hard shutdown. audio The game features both orchestrated music and voice work, although neither of them is very good. The music is the typical brassy fare you would associate with Trek, and some of it does sound close to the hooks you would associate with the series. The voice work, by contrast, is pretty mediocre and is plagued with repetitive phrases that one would never, ever hear on Star Trek. gameplay Conquest is a turn-based space combat game in the vein of the paper-and-pencil Star Fleet Battles and the Starfleet Command games derived from them. Set in the Next Generation / Deep Space Nine / Voyager time frame, players take turns building ships, battling enemies, and conquering sectors of the galaxy. There are five groups that players can choose from: Federation, Klingon, Romulan, Breen, Cardassian, and Dominion. In addition, unaffiliated sectors may be inhabited by Ferengi, Xindi (of Star Trek: Enterprise origin), Orion pirates, or even Borg. The game involves two main activities: growth and conquest. The growth aspect involves building starbases, mining facilities and research bases, which unlock ship construction, resource collection and upgrades, respectively. Conquest involves combat between an attacker and a defending system and can be played out either in a simulated static drama or in a real-time arcade fashion. The real-time arcade mode uses the Wii IR pointer to target ships and the A and B buttons to fire phasers / disruptors and torpedoes, respectively. The fatal flaw of Star Trek: Conquest is that both the growth and conquest aspects are extremely simplistic. Each race has only three starship classes: light, medium, and heavy, and those ships come with fixed weapons and armor. According to the game there is supposed to be a rock-paper-scissors relationship among the three classes, but in practice a fleet of heavy ships can wipe out most any other combination of vessels, especially in arcade mode. There is also some differentiation among races stylistically, but, as before, in practice the most part all of them play in the same fashion. Growth in the game is limited to building one type of mining facility and researching a few upgrades (somewhat different with each race) such as improved ship speed or lower ship cost. Combat is more or less a run-and-gun affair, with the only strategy that of trying to keep one’s strongest shields facing the enemy. multiplayer This is a single-player only contest, which is unfortunate because the style would seem naturally suited to multiplayer action. overall It’s good to see a Star Trek game on Wii; it’s just too bad it’s such a short and shallow affair. Most players will exhaust everything the game has to offer in a few hours and relegate this one to the dust bin. Worse still, fans of Gene Roddenberry’s franchise will be sorely disappointed by the decidedly non-Trek feel of much of the game. It’s an opportunity lost for Bethesda.
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