Computer And Video Games - The latest gaming news, reviews, previews & movies

	Overlord ³⁶⁰ Preview: No more Mr. Nice Guy in Codie's fantasy
	Star Trek: Legacy ³⁶⁰ Review: Underwhelming. They have made it so-so
	Parabellum ³⁶⁰ Preview: Counter-Strike with a Latin twist
	The Darkness Interview: Starbreeze spills its guts on its new FPS

All

PC

PlayStation

Xbox

Nintendo

Mobile

BROWSE CVG

XBOX 360

Contact us
Feeds

Login

Not a member yet? Click here to register!

Video

Launch Player

More Magazines

PC Zone	OXM
Total Film	PSW
Next-Gen.biz	T3

Xbox: Xbox 360 Reviews

Blue Dragon ³⁶⁰

Reviews Index

Review

Star Trek: Legacy

5.0

Format Xbox 360

Developer Mad Doc Software

Publisher Bethesda Softworks

Genre Sim / Strategy

3-Jan-2007 All five captains team up for almost the ultimate Trek adventure!

4 Comments

Well we're just happy to be ordering the NX-01 around the place with the promise that if we do it for long enough we'll get to be Picard. If you're also so in love with Star Trek you're happy just steering its famous ships about the place while looking at them in awe, this is a kind of alright game. Just bear in mind that's all you ever do, though.

Each mission starts with a nice little intro, episode title, and spoken voiceover by one of the five captains you order about as you zip through the Star Trek timeline. All very nice, all very Star Trek and all nice and atmospheric. Then you go into the same old space battle scenes. This always happens. The whole game is a bit of plot, then space battle scenes. Endless space battle scenes.

"That seems to be all of them. Oh no -here are some more!" goes the monotone voiceover as you beat one wave of Romulans only for another wave of Romulans to appear, then it's off into another horribly controlling space battle.

Poor old Scott Bakula. Enterprise's Jonathan Archer and the first Trek captain you get to order about as Admiral of the Federation fleet, really isn't into it much either. He sounds a little bored freading out his lines, as bored as we got working out how to manoeuvre a lumbering galaxy class star cruiser.

The controls of your spaceships just aren't good enough. You rotate your ship in 3D. You rotate the camera in 3D. You fight in 3D - it's all just too much 3D. The right bumper button brings up a lock-on target for battles, but it's hopelessly vague.

Sometimes you're shooting at one of the endless swarms of Klingon ships and the lock-on decides to target another ship entirely. It just changes all on its own. Weapons are equally hard and puzzling to use. Enemy ships need to be within phaser range to shoot at, which seems fair enough, but the rules about which direction you have to be facing in are bewildering. Often you hammer fire only for nothing to happen for no reason you can work out. And don't get us started on how slow the photon torpedoes are to get going. What the hell's going on in engineering?

Playing Legacy is all so very awkward. It's best to hit the Back button and pull up the 2D grid if you want to navigate anywhere in a hurry. It's just that playing Trek battles on bland a 2D grid isn't exactly the sort of thing Microsoft had in mind when it stuffed all those massively powerful chip things inside Xbox 360. Legacy also features graphics from the '60s. The ships are detailed enough, but there's a lot of empty space and some of the puniest, weakest and least impressive explosions you'll ever see. After spending five minutes painfully manoeuvring three Starfleet vessels around to blast a Klingon Warbird into pieces, you expect something a bit more impressive to happen than it changing red and flashing orange a bit before disappearing.

Xbox Live play is at least comprehensive. You can slowly and awkwardly rotate your way through battles from any of the Trek eras, in a deathmatch or with Friends on Co-op Wave, with slightly basic leaderboards keeping track of your kills, matches and defeats. It's adequate, but nothing exciting or action packed.

If you're happy to rotate very slowly and awkwardly in space and gawp at the pretty spaceships, this will fulfil those being-Picard fantasies. Just don't go expecting anything other than slow and cumbersome space battles when you're done checking the NCC-1701D's exterior for technical accuracy.

Gary Cutlack