Star Trek: Legacy (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 2.5 stars OK
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 5.8 (2.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Jason Ocampo
• Reviewed on: 12/13/2006
• Updated on: 12/14/2006
• Released on: 12/05/2006
• Originally published on GameSpot: Star Trek: Legacy (PC) Review

It seems like a can't-lose proposition: A Star Trek game, arriving in the year of the franchise's 40th anniversary and featuring nothing but glorious starship combat, as well as the voices of all five Star Trek captains. That sounds like paradise to Trek fans starved after an unexpected hiatus of new games over the past several years. However, if you're a Trek fan, prepare to have your hopes dashed. Star Trek: Legacy limps out of development like the Excelsior trying to chase the Enterprise in The Search for Spock. It's practically broken in some places, and if that weren't enough, it's plagued with other serious issues, as well.

Legacy puts you in charge of up to a four-ship task force of Starfleet vessels, spanning the entire breadth of Star Trek. You'll start with Archer, in the NX-01, before moving onto Kirk, Picard, Sisko, and Janeway. The plot cleverly ties together all five Star Trek franchises by using the Borg as the plot device. By chance, a typically long-lived Vulcan scientist learns about the Borg during the early days of the Federation and figures out a way to become their queen, though this quest will take decades. Along the way, she crosses paths with every famous Star Trek captain, and they attempt to ascertain what she's up to and stop her. Sure, there's a lot of revisionist history going on here, enough to make any Trek purist's head spin, but since Star Trek has always felt free to tinker with its history, it's not horribly egregious.

What will make you pound your head in frustration are the controls, which are a nightmare to learn, made worse by the way the game throws you into the action with barely any practice. You'll be flying the starships in three-dimensional space from a third-person perspective using a floating camera. However, it becomes a mess trying to figure out how to maneuver, and it's easy to get disoriented while trying to track a target in the distance. It also doesn't help that the controls feel clumsy and your ships don't respond well. Sure, they're lumbering beasts, which is what you'd expect since these are capital ships and not nimble fighters, but trying to maneuver into firing position on a target below or above you is a pain. Put it together, and you'll be in for a lot of early frustration as you attempt to get used to the control scheme and camera.

Assuming you're willing to embrace the learning curve, you'll dive into a campaign filled with some good highs but also some infuriating lows, thanks to crazy mission designs. First, you can't save at all during a mission, which means that if you fail, you have to start the entire thing over. Considering some missions can easily last an hour, the lack of an in-mission save gets annoying awfully quickly. It doesn't help that mission objectives are sometimes hazy, and you'll zoom about trying to figure out what you need to do. Other times, the mission objectives are insanely difficult, and you'll need to turn in a superhuman effort to win. A case in point is a save-the-planets mission where you have to warp around and destroy stellar debris before they crash into planets. However, the margin for error is so small that the slightest misstep can cause mission failure. And when you're busy fighting the controls, it doesn't take long before anger sets in.

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Star Trek: Legacy (PC): $34.94

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Recent user reviews

• Average user rating: 2.0 stars out of 6 reviews
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• 3.0 stars

  "Almost a Great Game"

  by rkinne01 on August 16, 2007

• 2.0 stars

  "Not As Good As It Could Be"

  by windows_xp_hacker on April 7, 2007

• 2.0 stars

  "Not what I expected!"

  by Reelrob on January 15, 2007

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