Introduction

We have given a lot of coverage to Star Trek: Legacy in the past few months. We got to see (but not play) the upcoming space based action-strategy game from developer Mad Doc Software and publisher Bethesda Softworks. We have also done three separate interviews on the game. But this week we finally got a chance to get some hands-on game time with an Xbox 360 beta version of the title (it will also be released for the PC) and so far we like what we have played.

To recap briefly, Star Trek: Legacy isn’t an RTS game and it’s not exactly an action shoot-em-up in space either. In some ways it’s kind of like a Rainbow Six title where you select your ships in your mini-fleet, upgrade them with different abilities, and then control them in a tactical action-like format. The result is a space based game that contains all of the cool action stuff you can handle but just enough strategy and thinking to keep the hardcore gamers occupied.

The single player campaign, as stated before, roughly goes through all of the time periods of the various Star Trek TV series and movies, ending after the events of the last Trek film Star Trek: Nemesis (we don’t want to give away too much about the storyline here; you will have to see how it uses the Trek timeline for yourself).


Much has been made of the voices of all five TV Trek captains in Star Trek: Legacy and indeed they are here in this game. It’s a good thing too because the cut scenes in our build were nothing but ship scenes with voice overs. Overall the actors do a solid job with their voice work although William Shatner does seem to not be putting 100 percent of his role as Captain Kirk (the final game will have video interviews with all five Trek captains but these interviews were not in our Xbox 360 beta build).


As we said, the game gives you up to four ships to command and in the single player game you have your choice of ships from the Federation as you go through the timeline of the storyline, from the original NX-01 commanded by Captain Jonathan Archer all the way up to Voyager’s Captain Kathryn Janeway.


As you move through the campaign and accomplish the missions ( destroying enemy ships, escort missions and so on) you get points that you can use to purchase new ships or upgrade your existing ships with better weapons, shields and more. In battle you can use the controller to repair your ships, altering the default setting to concentrate on, say, repairing your shields more than your engines. You can also alter where your ship’s power source can go for your ships under your command, putting more power to the engines, Captain….they canna take much more…oh, sorry…switched into Scotty mode for a second there.