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 - James Kirk fighting the Borg? Please...I waited for this game to come out for months and I really, really wanted to love it. I held out until I beat the game so I could give it a fair review. Overall, it's an entertaining and fun game that's plagued with some serious problems. It looks like Bethesda spent most of their budget on getting Shatner, Brooks, Stewart etc to do the voice-overs rather than hiring good story writers and game testers. Probably the biggest problem I have with it has nothing to do with the actual game play. The game's writers took WAY too many liberties with established Star Trek lore. I know that games aren't considered part of the Star Trek "canon" but it's irresponsible to the franchise and just plain bad writing to have James T. Kirk chasing the Borg. Some of the missions' story lines are just plain ridiculous and more often than not, when I beat a mission I was left scratching my head saying to myself "That's it? I beat it?" They had the resources, the actors and the access to some of the greatest stories in science fiction to make an awesome game -- and they squandered it. They had access to Avery Brooks (Capt. Sisko from DS9), they had DS9 and the USS Defiant rendered and dozens of Klingon ships. They could have easily recreated part of the Dominion War. How cool would it be to run the Dominoin blockade with the Defiant? How about Kirk chasing Kahn around in his stolen USS Reliant? Take the Defiant out and chase Gul Dukat and his rogue Cardassians in his stolen Bird of Prey? Complete a mission in which you have to slingshot around the sun, go back in time and transport 2 whales into your cargo bay? How about taking the Voyager out, sneaking into a Borg swarm and stealing a transwarp coil or a new cortical implant for Seven. They had all those actors in the studio, for crying out loud. They did nothing with the story. And the gameplay, oh the gameplay. The control are confusing and clunky. Every ships' controls react the same exact way, from the NX-01 to the Defiant: like riding a road bike in the sand. The AI is idioic too. You can group ships in your fleet together and issue group commands but you have to always check your strategic map because sometimes a ship would just go off, meandering through space on its own. The game is half strategy, half flight simulator and it doesn't do either one well. If it just picked one, the game would be better. After I got the hang of it, I figured out the trick to winning every time: group your ships into one task force and use the map to pick targets and aim. I gave up of trying to fly my ship around entirely. Once I figured that out, the game became obscenely easy - I beat the game in two days, playing only after work. As of this writing, I've never been able to play a full game on Xbox Live. It locks up, times out or disconnects me every single time. All in all, it's a fun game that had a lot of potential but fell way, way too short. Pros: - Good graphics - Plenty of cool ships to buy - Voice actors are cool and the sound is good - Despite the clunky interface, it is an addicting game - It's better than the other Bethesda ST game (Star Trek Encounters on the PS2) which is completely unplayable Cons: - Clunky, confusing controls - Simple , one dimensional missions (I beat the game in two days) - Doesn't follow established Star Trek lore - Stupid AI - No DS9 or Voyager missions - It sucks as a space flight simulator and it really sucks as a strategy game Rating:  - Who is really in command?Bethesda, you have a problem. Star Trek Legacy needs a lot of work. To get the game where it needs to be, have your software designers pick up a copy of Activision's Star Trek Bridge Commander, and study it carefully. After I got passed my initial adrenaline rush brought on by STL's stunning graphics, crystal-clear voiceovers and music, I was immediately disappointed by its clunky menus, control interface and tedious multiplayer game lobby, which even the most experienced Xbox 360 gamers will have trouble figuring out. One thing is certain, Starfleet ship designers at Utopia Planetia would never approve Bethesda's STL interface for use on any starship. It's also so painful trying to get a multiplayer game going from the STL's game lobby, if you're lucky to get anyone to play with at all. You'll also expend a lot of energy explaining the interface to the other players, so I don't recommend playing the game on an empty stomach. And once a multiplayer game ends, you can't start a new one with the same players or even communicate with them, for that matter. So long, suckers. This huge deficiency is completely incompatible with the fundamental goal of Xbox Live, which is to connect with other gamers in a virtual community. You also can't join an STL multiplayer game in progress from the Xbox 360's dashboard. When you're in the heat of a battle, you can't target individual systems on an enemy ship. In contrast, in Activision's Bridge Commander, the player decides what to target, i.e. the warp core, sensors, engines or cloaking device, to either destroy or disable an enemy. No such luck in STL, the program's artificial intelligence will choose what it will target on an enemy vessel. You'll be left asking yourself, "So, how did I destroy that ship?" Who needs a battle autopilot? There's no fun in that. In ST: Next Generation, Picard would never have said, "Weapons, target whatever you want. Fire." Bethesda has the legacy part right. The game offers a lot of ships from the various Star Trek eras to choose from. But there's still much work to be done to make this simulation more real and Star Trek-compliant. Bethesda, please get back to work. Rating:  - Not the greatest, but good.In many ways this game is made after a Star Trek show (along the lines of the average Deep Space Nine or Voyager episode that goes absolutely nowhere), but instead of exploring, using diplomacy, meeting new races, you simply fly your starship around and blast the hell out of your enemies. In many ways it's a shame for those of us old-schoolers who played great games such as Star Control 2 and Starflight, because one gets the feeling while playing Star Trek: Legacy that this really could have been not just a great game, but an unforgettable and awesome game. Aside from that, the graphics are not all that great, but not bad either. When things explode, they kind of just break off into big pieces and all you can really do is lift your eyebrows to whoever designed that. However, in the midst of fighting, the graphics, especially when one fires a photon torpedo, are pretty nice at times. The soundtrack is good, but as another reviewer mentioned, it would have been really nice to have the original themes (and yes, even that terrible theme from Enterprise would have made me smile once or twice). Controls are alright, just take a while to get used to, like most games. The gameplay is average. You fly around, shoot, warp to another location, follow a preordained storyline and then voila, tu es finit. For what it's worth, that's not all that bad (it's much better than watching an episode from the first few seasons of Deep Space Nine or Voyager, for that matter), but I really would have liked to see them do something original, perhaps finish the storyline of the show Enterprise that for whatever dreadful reason was canceled before its time. Since you start off fighting the Romulans, it would have been nice to have the game go where the show Enterprise was going: to the eventual war with the Romulan empire, the nuclear attack on Earth, and the forming of the Federation of Planets and the creation of the neutral zone. This game really would have shined if you could have flown from star system to star system (like Star Control 2), meeting new races and being able to talk to them, visiting planets with a first or third person perspective, discovering and implementing new technologies, forming alliances and enemies by the way you use diplomacy, and having a sweet storyline develop amidst all that. But as things stand, you simply can't do that in this game. But for what it's worth, what you can do in this game isn't all too terrible, since it gives you the feeling of being amidst one of those great space battles we all love to see in the show. It's just that after the battles, the cut scenes and the story, you're left wondering, "What? Can that really be it? Can I really not do anything else?" So, in the end, is this game worth buying? Sadly, yes, due to the dearth of other titles of this genre currently out there. Even though I myself didn't buy this game (I received it for Christmas from my brother, along with a celestron telescope and a book, Toilet: The Novel, that I also highly recommend after I finished reading it yesterday)...I would still go and buy Star Trek: Legacy if I didn't receive it as a gift, because with the lack of Trek currently out there, no shows, a movie that may or may not be made, (and the show Battlestar Galatica slowly moving away from its origins into some silly boxing sitcom) this is really and truly all there is for the time being. Sad, isn't it? Rating:  - A root canal is more fun than this gameThis game is a travesty. Poor controls and poor mission design will have you bashing your head against your console until you lose enough blood to pass out. Going to the dentist for a root canal is a more enjoyable Star Trek experience than this awful attempt at a Starship Combat game. It is as though Mad Doc software took all of the good ideas that could have been put into a Star Trek starship combat game, jumped up and down on them, shredded them, flushed them down the toilet, retrieved them from the sewer, burnt them and then buried them in concrete to make sure that none of them were implemented. Don't buy this game for anyone else unless you really hate them, even then you would have to really dislike them to purchase them something so wretched. Rating:  - Highly underrated...I have seen a lot of biased feedback concerning this game but I still kept an open mind regarding the gameplay, graphics, storylines, etc., and i am very glad that I did. I chose to purchase this game on the XBox 360 console and do not regret my decision one bit. This is by far one of the most addictive games that i own and certainly deserves a much better list of reviews than it has received thus far. I dare say that most of the people who are enjoying the game are too busy playing it to actually get online and post a review in its defense. I mean, why would you worry about the listings of others who say that they did not enjoy it if it completely contradicts what you are experiencing first hand and enjoying every bit of it. This game is as good as Star Trek Voyager Elite Force and even the Sega Genesis Star Trek TNG video game from that console for its time. Bethesda has done very well with this title and has, to me and others I am sure, kept up the quality that is present in their Elder Scrolls: Oblivion work. If you are a Star Trek fan in the least and have any knowledge of how things have been playing out on the TV screen for the past several years, you might just rate this game higher than some of the series spinoffs. As far as how it works for the PC, I suspect that it might be close to being as good as it is on the 360 but I chose the one that I did since Santa was nice enough to drop in a 32 inch High Def monitor for the family room and now all of the 360 games look great. Even after receiving some 10 other Xbox games at Christmas, I still cannot put down Legacy. I am an avid gamer and electronics enthusiast and love Trek and Star Wars. I assure you that I would not stand behind a product that was poorly made and poorly represented either of those two legendary sagas. Give it a try and enjoy it. You will not regret it.
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