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I try to be fair. Really, I do. But every so often a game is presented to me that I simply don't understand. I grasp the ins and outs of how to play the game, but for the life of me, I can't grasp what about it is supposed to be fun. This is made all the more frustrating when this is seemingly the result of conscious design decisions, and not a rushed schedule or seemingly incompetent developers.
Maybe I'm not enough of a Trekkie to understand. Sure, I enjoyed watching Kirk and Picard's crews explore the unknown nether-regions of space, but I never bothered to understand or even question how the phasers were placed, how the shields worked, or where the power came from. To me, Star Trek was more about the memorable characters and how they interacted than what it must be like to actually pilot a starship.
Star Trek has always used a lot of naval language, so I suppose it's fitting that Star Trek: Tactical Assault feel a bit like a naval simulation. That means your ships are slow, unwieldy, and combat often boils down to slowly circling each other while trying to face the appropriate gun. Although this is a realtime, mostly combat-oriented title, it is by no means an action game.
The game proves an ample challenge, and the combat is fairly strategic, but it takes too long to play out most fights, they are achingly slow, and many of them feel like the same thing over and over.
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Tactical Assault takes the seafaring parallels a step further by creating an invisible flat "sea" to sail across. While all the graphics are 3D, and the camera looking down on an angle, your ship is glued to this plane, able to turn in a yaw from side to side, but never to pitch up and down. This was especially frustrating because it shows that the developers were clearly willing to make a major sacrifice to the game's realism, but they chose not to do it in a way that might improve the pace, or liven up the action.
I was happy to find that there is an element of diplomacy to be found, which has always been a major theme in the Trek series. You can handle situations a number of ways by navigation conversation trees. However, all of these decisions usually still boil down to some soggy slow motion fighting.
There are two fully functional methods of control. The button-based interface seems a bit over-complex, and I struggled to remember all of the shortcuts for the various controls. The touch-screen controls seemed more intuitive, but they weren't very effective for actually navigating the ship. I found myself using a combination of the two, which was slightly awkward, but perfectly effective.
But what ultimately left this feeling futile was the fact that none of this was any fun at all. The game proves an ample challenge, and the combat is fairly strategic, but it takes too long to play out most fights, they are achingly slow, and many of them feel like the same thing over and over. It's clear to me that the developers had a vision for this game, but whatever they were attempting to do is simply lost on me. I'm afraid this time, that's all the insight I can provide.
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