Star Trek Tactical Assault
Score: 80% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: Bethesda Softworks Developer: Quicksilver Media: UMD/1 Players: 1 - 2 Genre: Shooter
Graphics & Sound: Star Trek Tactical Assault is a ship-on-ship combat game with all of the bells, whistles and minute control that Star Trek fans will appreciate. Where the PSP version of Tactical Assault really shines is its graphics. From the first menu screen (a faithful recreation of the USS Enterprise-A's bridge) to the detail and smoothness of each ship, I was just amazed by the game's ability to fit so much detail onto the handheld. Tactical Assault keeps the orchestral and spacey background music that is common to the series. There is only one voice talent attached to this title (or any of the other recent Star Trek releases from Bethesda for that matter), and that is none other than Captain James T. Kirk, William Shatner, himself. Shatner's acting is very much in the vein of his own stereotypical style that we have all come to appreciate.
Gameplay: Star Trek Tactical Assault takes place during the events of the original movies (when Kirk was Captain [again] and the Klingons were the bad guys). And in this game you take command as a new captain in either Star Fleet or the Klingon Empire. The game's Story mode has you working your way up through a series of ships after a series of battles with your race's main foe, as well as various other races from the Star Trek universe, including the Romulans and the recently re-popularized Andorians. Missions typically have you being contacted by the Federation (or Empire depending on your story arc) to go to some other star system and answer a distress call. When you arrive, you attempt to hail and talk down the aggressors in the conflict and, more times than not, get into a battle. During a fight, you will have six colored arcs appear around your ship. Each arc represents your shields over a section of your hull. As that arc takes damage, it will turn red and eventually fail. Then you have a hole in your defenses. Thankfully, your opponents have the same indicators on their ships, so you will be able to tell where they are taking the most damage as well.
Difficulty: Star Trek Tactical Assault starts off easy with some nice tutorials, but it isn't long before you have to become fully versed in your ships' strengths and weaknesses in order to win a fight. In fact, it seems like the difficulty level of the game ramps up almost too quickly and there were plenty of times when I felt like the early missions that taught me how to use my ship's various weapons and functions did not adequately prepare me for the trying times ahead. Put simply, there were more missions that forced me to start over more times than I'd care to admit in writing. And yes, occasionally the game got a bit too frustrating to continue playing and I had to put it down for a while.
Game Mechanics: Star Trek Tactical Assault gives you a fair amount of control over the many things you can do with a star ship. And while the game doesn't go into the kind of detail that Encounters does (balancing power levels between weapons and shields for example), there is still quite a lot to manage. For the most part, you will just have to worry about the D-Pad for steering and the face buttons for firing your primary and secondary weapons and hailing or scanning ships. Since these are the actions you are likely to do more frequently in or just before a battle, it's a good thing these actions aren't hard to pick up. It's the other controls that make you stop occasionally and look in the manual for a reference. The R button is overloaded pretty heavily , and when combined with other buttons, you will do a more complicated maneuver. R plus Square activates a warp while the same button plus Triangle, X or Circle will recharge your shields/cloak or overcharge your weapons and secondary weapons respectively. When used with the D-Pad, the ship will either get a boost when accelerating, stop quickly or make tighter turns. Thankfully, with the exception of the D-Pad functionality, most of these actions don't really need to be done in the heat of a battle and you won't have to pause and reference the book too many times while the Klingons are bearing down on you. One aspect of the PSP version that gives it a leg up over the DS one is that you don't have as many menus or options to keep straight. On the DS, the entire lower screen is devoted to various things like crew alert status or information on your shields, navigation and weapons. And while it is good to have that kind of control, it was just too overwhelming and this version definitely simplified things a bit. Star Trek Tactical Assault is a game made entirely for fans of the series, and of the original crew in particular. If you have never really gotten into Star Trek, then, as a ship-to-ship combat game, you might find Star Trek Tactical Assault lacking. Unlike games like Wing Commander or other similarly styled titles, you don't have a wide variety of weapons and you are firmly relegated to what the series has to offer, in both ships and capabilities. So ST fans are pretty much the only people who will be able to appreciate this game.
-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer
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