Star Trek: Tactical Assault
Hands-on with Bethesda's portable take on the Star Trek universe.
Published: October 27, 2006
So here's a question: you've gotten your hands on the Star Trek license -- full rights to all the characters and timelines and a near-limitless amount of lore and information at your fingertips, so what do you do with it? In the case of Bethesda Softworks, you think of four completely different takes on the universe and set about whipping them up for just about every platform possible; PC, portables, next-gen and even our aging little PS2.
It's the portable version that we're interested in, however -- or at least what we've been spending a couple hours with as of late. Star Trek: Tactical Assault is, as the name would hopefully indicate, less of an action game, and more of a thinking man's take on the old school Kirk/Spock/Bones-era Trek world. It's not without action, but there's a deliberate pacing to the real-time battles that took us some getting used to. Luckily, once we had, we found a surprising amount of enjoyment to be had with what is now the final version of the game (the PSP version was bumped a bit, so you'll have to wait another couple weeks for our full review).
Plunked into the decidedly green shoes of a freshly minted Starfleet captain, we got our first taste of what it was like to spearhead the Federation's efforts to build a lasting relationship with the Klingons as the skipper of a ship that would scoot around the Neutral Zone. Luckily, it just so happened to coincide with the Federation's replacement of older ships with shiny new ones, which is what we managed to land. Sure, it was just a frigate, but everyone's gotta start somewhere.
First, though, we had to get down the basic controls; we learned to target objects, scan them, hail friendlies and enemies alike, warp around and, most importantly, learned to defend ourselves. Main helm control in the game is dictated by simple d-pad movements; up and down to increase thrusters and left and right banks with L/R taps on the d-pad. Starfleet vessels apparently control something like boats, so the more forward momentum there is, the easier they are to turn.
This was made most clear when our initial training was interrupted by a distress signal. Warping off to the location of the distress, we quickly learned a few important lessons. Lesson 1: raising the status to Yellow Alert gives you shields, but you've got to go to Red Alert to kick on the weapons -- and they take time to warm up. This is important because Lesson 2 was that, despite how it may seem in the TV series, a single well-placed phaser blast won't really blow a ship to smithereens -- at least not with a piddly little frigate's phaser banks. No, instead you need to chip away at a ship's shields, using the batteries fore and aft to whittle a hole in the target's defenses and then plug a couple of shots at the hull proper.
This is easier said than done, however, as the skippers of those ships aren't just going to sit around and watch their shields drop; targets -- even early ones -- are constantly on the move, so there's just as much jockeying to get into position for a strike as there is unloading on someone. All the while, phasers have to recharge and there's always the chance for some diplomacy too, so hails are an option too.
It's the portable version that we're interested in, however -- or at least what we've been spending a couple hours with as of late. Star Trek: Tactical Assault is, as the name would hopefully indicate, less of an action game, and more of a thinking man's take on the old school Kirk/Spock/Bones-era Trek world. It's not without action, but there's a deliberate pacing to the real-time battles that took us some getting used to. Luckily, once we had, we found a surprising amount of enjoyment to be had with what is now the final version of the game (the PSP version was bumped a bit, so you'll have to wait another couple weeks for our full review).
Plunked into the decidedly green shoes of a freshly minted Starfleet captain, we got our first taste of what it was like to spearhead the Federation's efforts to build a lasting relationship with the Klingons as the skipper of a ship that would scoot around the Neutral Zone. Luckily, it just so happened to coincide with the Federation's replacement of older ships with shiny new ones, which is what we managed to land. Sure, it was just a frigate, but everyone's gotta start somewhere.
First, though, we had to get down the basic controls; we learned to target objects, scan them, hail friendlies and enemies alike, warp around and, most importantly, learned to defend ourselves. Main helm control in the game is dictated by simple d-pad movements; up and down to increase thrusters and left and right banks with L/R taps on the d-pad. Starfleet vessels apparently control something like boats, so the more forward momentum there is, the easier they are to turn.
This was made most clear when our initial training was interrupted by a distress signal. Warping off to the location of the distress, we quickly learned a few important lessons. Lesson 1: raising the status to Yellow Alert gives you shields, but you've got to go to Red Alert to kick on the weapons -- and they take time to warm up. This is important because Lesson 2 was that, despite how it may seem in the TV series, a single well-placed phaser blast won't really blow a ship to smithereens -- at least not with a piddly little frigate's phaser banks. No, instead you need to chip away at a ship's shields, using the batteries fore and aft to whittle a hole in the target's defenses and then plug a couple of shots at the hull proper.
This is easier said than done, however, as the skippers of those ships aren't just going to sit around and watch their shields drop; targets -- even early ones -- are constantly on the move, so there's just as much jockeying to get into position for a strike as there is unloading on someone. All the while, phasers have to recharge and there's always the chance for some diplomacy too, so hails are an option too.
