The interface as a whole is unreliable, and even buggy (targeting other ships is a pain, and subsystem targeting is downright unwieldy), the game’s combat elements poorly thought out (while you can repair parts of your ship by holding down the “R” key and clicking on the component to repair, this process is completely manual and your AI companions will never do this for themselves), and many aspects of the title just don’t hold up to today’s standards; certainly not the standards set forth by it’s predecessors. Even the extra “Skirmish” option lacks refinement, since you can only customize your own fleet, but not the exact ships the enemies will fly (you can only choose their race). Here’s a weird note too: As an exploit to most missions, any time you get in trouble, just warp away for a bit and repair. The enemies will pursue you, but only at basic impulse speed, so you can wait to re-engage at your leisure. A brief browse through the configuration files shows that a flag allowing the AI to give chase at warp speeds is actually disabled, so try to figure that one out.

If it sounds like I’m coming down hard on the game, it’s just due to my sheer annoyance at how Legacy ‘tries’ to be fun, but the poor design is always getting in the way of this – which sucks tremendously, because lurking under the surface is a terrific and fun game about space combat and exploration just begging to be let out. To the game’s credit, the graphics are quite appealing and do the universe a good deal of justice (aside from lack of animated “phaser strips” on the future-era vessels and some other nit-picking purist details), and framerates stayed consistently high at all times. The game also offers the standard-issue dynamic visible-damage modeling that seems complimentary with most Star Trek space titles (and why this kind of system isn’t implemented in other space games by now is totally beyond me), although I’ve seen some really strange results when a ship’s engine is destroyed and three engine nacelles come flying out as debris, when a ship only had two to begin with. On the downside, I had some problems where my changes to several graphical options, such as “Shadows” never actually seemed to save properly, and there also seem to be some major framerate issues on lower-end systems (such as those still equipped with 9800 Pro cards).

At the very least the developers did go the extra mile of implementing multiplayer support, but even this is pretty basic and involve some simple deathmatch and co-operative “wave-based” modes. Both these modes are fun for a little while, but I still found myself disappointed when I poked through the game’s data files again and found numerous references to a more advanced and strategic form of territory-based multiplayer that never made it into the final game. I would’ve also loved to see the co-op play translate into the main campaign – and this might actually be something that happens in the future, as the modding community is already working hard on the game and trying to get the kinks out (giving the unfortunate side effect of making it hard to play online unless you have their modified files loaded). Still, this just turns out to be another cool novelty victimized by the game’s complete lack of refinement.

Really, the best way to sum up Legacy is nothing more than “unfinished”. I’m confident with a longer development cycle (and a slightly altered approach to the interface and gameplay) this could have been a really promising and impressive title. Instead, Star Trek: Legacy wallows in infamy and ultimately fails to make any kind of noteworthy impact on the space gaming genre. Can it be saved through patches, updates, and even third-party modding? Possibly, but right now there isn’t much to recommend the game with, and even die-hard Trek fans will probably be better off grabbing a copy of Bridge Commander and indulging in the plethora of enhancements available for it to get a much truer experience.