Interface

She looks awful from the front!

The front-end of the game, is, in one word, atrocious. The design isn't the best in the world, though that isn't our major gripe. Sure, we'd appreciate detailed information on the weapons in the game, and the campaign map would be a lot nicer if it actually provided some data on the sector you were moving to, but that's still not the biggest problem we had with the front end.

What killed the interface is its speed. On a Thunderbird 1GHz with 256MB of RAM and an IBM Deskstar 32GXP 7200RPM ATA 66 hard drive, the game took forever to load screens. Switching from the main menu to the singleplayer or multiplayer campaign took as long as loading maps in an unpatched version of SiN.

Boom! Hehehe

Pretty remains

The campaign map in the singleplayer game wasn't much better. Map controls are very unintuitive. The map provides scan information, but the only indication of what ship you fly is an obscure serial code. Want to see another part of the galaxy? Good luck clicking those tiny buttons that control the map. To make things even worse, movement between hexes took lifetimes.

Your only source of information on the status of the various empires is a generic text writeup that describes the general traits of the empire in question. There is no real-time information on how well the Klingon Empire is doing or what kind of shape the Federation is in. However, even general write-up we mentioned has an annoying knack of scrolling itself off the screen as real-time news of various galactic events comes in. Bad design.

Dropping some doo-doo

About to get spanked!

Bugs Captain!

Though the majority of bugs I experienced were simply graphical glitches, in my quest for help I stumbled across the Interplay message boards. They helped confirm a few problems I thought I experienced, and helped get the game running stable. Definitely worth a visit, especially the General and Bug Report boards.

The more annoying bugs I experienced include:

Inventory changes. These were hard to confirm since at first I merely thought the changes a product of my imagination, or perhaps a screw up on my part while playing the game. But after loading a savegame and seeing that instead of my Heavy Cruiser I had a Frigate, and reading similar reports on the Bug forum, it's clearly a bug. More importantly, it's a bug that bit me hard enough to quit that campaign.

Ouch, my butt is getting sore

I can't believe I forgot the lube

Item changes are more rare and harder to track down. After all, did you save the game with 20 Fast Type IV missiles or did you use them all up and switch to Slow Types Is?

Finally, some of the features don't seem to work properly. For example, overloaded photon torpedoes were never ready to fire in any of my Federation ships, no matter how long I waited or what my settings were. They would charge up to just before Overload status and wouldn't power up any further.

Mo' betta, just not betta enuf

Once you actually make it into the tactical component of the game (in control of your ship) the interface improves a great deal. It is a bit overwhelming with the amount of information and available options thrown at you, but it just takes a bit of practice to get accustomed. Controlling your ships gets easier with time. Within 10-15 hours of play, anyone should be able to put up a good fight.

I won't sit down for a week after this

Why show a new Klingon in an old ST game?

Where the interface fails is in the subtleties. For flavor, each different race has different-looking interfaces. The first encounter with a race's interface is sure to breed some frustration. The general look is the same, with mostly cosmetic changes, but it does get annoying re-learning all the buttons every time.

There are a few other minor complaints. For example, the so-called highlight for your selected weapons is rather pathetic. It's difficult to distinguish which weapons you have selected, and which are not. Similar, minor problems pop up here and there, though for the most part the combat interface is far superior to its strategic counterpart.