Previous Next

The smell of rocket fuel, the void in your hair, oh the joys of being a spaceborne ranger.

Star Command is set in the familiar territory of a space nation under threat. The aliens are bug-eyed and green, the ships jump through hyperspace and lasers rule the roost. You build a team from everyday people in the street, examining their abilities and choosing a profession for them - pilot, soldier, marine or esper. Then it's off to college for eight years to learn the subtle art of meeting interesting alien lifeforms and killing them. After the training, your skilled, though still green, warriors are sent on their first mission. But before the off, there are a few basic necessities that may come in handy. Such as a ship.

Now Star Command is safe in its rulers' hands because you have to buy all your own kit in order to kill someone else's enemies! The cutbacks mean the lump sum you're given to buy your toys is pitiful. There's all these state-of-the-art mega-death devices down the arms-dealing supermarket, but all you can afford first time round is a set of second-hand space age peashooters.

The missions follow instructions to explore an area of the galaxy and look for/bring back/do something. So off oyu zip from Starport Luna and head into the wild black yonder. Occasionally inter-ship combat develops when the unidentified ships you meet aren't entirely convinced by your deity impersonations and demands for fuel. This is a slow business, as you creep around popping shots at each other.

Once you've arrived planet side, you fly the drop ship down to terra firma for the real action. This is where the game promises to deliver; "realistically" representing future wars. But gung ho it ain't, as the fighting totally lacks any pace whatsoever, again laboriously controlled by vague text displays.

The word for Star Command: ponderous. A standard role-playing game, all its options are text-driven, with choices displayed on various menus and sub-lists. Switching between menus must be fast and smooth to stop the game being weighed down by continual disk access and pointless questions, but this is not the case with Star Command. The menus are plentiful, but the choices few. This would be forgivable if your actions were dramatically enacted. Yet the graphics are woefully inadequate: stick men, of all things, represent your team when planetside! There are some beautiful representations of space stations, but these are purely cosmetic and add nothing to the game itself.

A vast role-playing adventure with varied tasks and challenges this may be. But it's too slow and too cumbersome to be worth the effort to find out. The crime of which some ST games are accused is exceptional graphics with insufficient gameplay. This is not the case for Star Command, as there are hardly any graphics and the gameplay is tedious and overly complex. The strategy elements remain underwhelming due to a lack of explanation in the manual, while the role-playing fragments the game, with everything having to be done eight times, not once.

Star Command is not a game the first time role player could enjoy without suffering long hours of frustration as squads are repeatedly wiped out. The experienced role-player on the other hand would find the limitations of the text-driven "adventure" unbearable. If this is "living" science fiction I'll take the present anyday.