Star Trek: Conquest

[Gabriel]

Star Trek: Conquest. Sort of a contradiction there, eh? Bethesda once again cranks out a budget PS2 game with a layer of Star Trek paint. The result is a hybrid strategy/shooter which is good for what it is, but feels lacking.

 

At first glance, Conquest seems to draw it's inspiration from Master of Orion II. Star systems pepper the cosmos and the ones you can go to are connected by a network of travel lines. Each star system has a different rating indicating how valuable it will be economically and scientifically. You can also fortify star systems by building starbases, mining/research facilities, or gun emplacements. During your turn you can also recruit up to three admirals and build ships for their fleets. Finally, in between each turn you can accumulate scientific research to upgrade your technology and construct superweapons such as the Genesis Device. You can play as 5 different races in the full wargame mode: Federation, Klingon, Romulan, Cardassian, Dominion, and Breen. There's also a quick play/skirmish mode which just lets you shoot things up, and also lets you select from a few other race/ship picks.

 

Simplicity is the order of the day. At most, you can have three fleets of 7 ships on the board. Any construction you order is immediately completed; there's no waiting for multiple turns to complete your new starbase. Each race has 3 different types of starships: scouts, cruisers, and dreadnoughts. The interface for the game is simple and straightforward. There are multiple ways to handle battle. There's Instant for when you really don't care what happens and just want to see the result. There's Sim for when you don't want to fight out a whole battle manually, but want to finesse things a bit. Finally, there's Arcade, where you manually fly your ships around and engage in turn n' burn starship combat.

 

Those who played Star Trek: Encounters will find the Arcade combat mode familiar. You steer your command ship around with the left analog stick, and your fleet will follow you like lonely puppies. The right analog stick controls where your guns are pointing. R1 fires your primary weapons (phasers), and R2 fires your secondary weapons (torpedoes). Circle commands your ships into a defensive formation. X commands your ships to attack all out. And if things go badly, triangle commands your fleet to run for the hills/nebulae. Combats take place in different environments which merely amount to wallpaper, and the foes fought against will be mixes of ships, turrets, and installations in various amounts.

 

The aforementioned admirals commanding your fleets have different abilities. Each admiral specializes in Attack, Defense, or Movement. As they fight and win battles, they gain experience and get better in their field. If they lose, you can replace them, but their experience and abilities are gone.

 

Whew! All that sounds like a lot, doesn't it? Sadly, it isn't. In reality, Conquest is a very light wargame. There isn't much to production other than building science stations everywhere early in the game, then switching to building mining stations everywhere as soon as you're outputting enough research points to get a tech upgrade once a turn. For your fleets you build lots and lots of dreadnoughts, and just start playing more or less like you'd play the boardgame Risk. (And the AI players seem to compensate in the same tradition as many other light wargame AI's, they cheat.)

 

Then there's the combat. It starts feeling samey in short order. And the camera is always zoomed in too tightly, often preventing you from seeing your targets before they're zooming past you at warp speed. The Sim and Instant combat options come to the rescue here, allowing you to skip boring battles you don't care to mess with. The price, of course, is the Instant and Sim modes hurt your ships far more than they would be if you played out the battle.

 

Some unlockables would have helped with all this, but the only unlockables are for the Skirmish mode. Campaign mode could have certainly used more race options, more admirals, more superweapons, and more ships. Instead, the bonus features which would have really elevated the game are completely absent.

 

Then there's the biggest sin the game commits. There is no multiplayer option. Fighting a starship war against a friend would have been another big saving grace of this game. It was not to be, though.

 

Conquest does still have a couple of aces up it's nacelle support pylon. For one, it's cheap. It's $15 US new. For another, it's really not all that bad. If you want to play a starship wargame with a slight Star Trek gloss and some arcadey/shooty combat resolution, then it's OK. A complete campaign of Conquest can be played in a couple of hours.

 

All in all, it's still hard to recommend the game. A big time strategy buff would probably rather have something meatier. Someone looking for a shooter would want something with more variety to their battlefields that what is here. And those looking for a blend of the two are probably looking for something like a starship version of Archon to play against a friend. This makes the whole situation look like a Kobayashi Maru scenario for the game. Ultimately though, I think the game has a secret plan to beat the no-win situation. There's not really anything else like it on a console at the moment and, once again, it's cheap. So, it's thoroughly average, if not bad, but it doesn't hurt your pocketbook to try it out and spank the Klingon Empire.

[MCHufnagel]

Thanks for the review. I can always count on you to deliver an in-depth review of what you've played.

 

I saw it yesterday at Best Buy when I was out Christmas shopping and thought, "not another Star Trek game". I didn't even see that it was by Bethesda. Too be honest my kids and I haven't played a PS2 game in quite some time. But at a budget price, maybe I can give it out to one of them as a stocking stuffer.

[Gabriel]

But at a budget price, maybe I can give it out to one of them as a stocking stuffer.

 

That's probably the best attitude. As a side dish, it's acceptably tasty. As a main course, it's underwhelming.

 

The most depressing thing about this game is the number of very little things which could have been done to vastly improve it. Then you learn some of those improvements are in the game as unlockables in the side-game/Skirmish mode, but not in the full game/Campaign mode. More ship choices and more races would have been great, and playing the game unlocks them. But you can't play campaign mode with the alternate Federation fleet type or conquer the galaxy as the Borg, Ferengi, or Xindi. You only get to use all these things in the rather pointless Skirmish mode.

[Mendon]

Great review (as usual), Gabriel !! Thanks for posting it.

 

I just received the Wii version of Conquest from GameFly and have only spent a couple minutes with the game so far, mostly trying to figure out how to play since I've been too lazy to download the .PDF instruction manual. A couple things I'll add to your review:

 

1) I was surprised that no Star Trek music is included. Maybe it is later on in the game or in another mode outside of campaign, but in the time I've played the game, no official Star Trek music has been heard even though the game is an official license.

 

2) I'm really, really tired of hearing "For the Empire", "For the Dominion", "Destroy them all", etc every battle.

 

So far, the game has my interest but not sure about the longevity of it.

 

Regarding multiplayer.... while I wish the game had that feature, maybe we should just consider ST: Conquest in the same category as playing Free Cell and let it go at that.

 

 

 

Mendon

[Gabriel]

2) I'm really, really tired of hearing "For the Empire", "For the Dominion", "Destroy them all", etc every battle.

 

Yeah. That's irritating. I didn't mention it because I completely forgot about it. I managed to tune it out while playing.

 

The one that really gets on my nerves is "For Earth!"

[Mendon]

Gabriel... I'm playing the Wii version of the game and was wondering about the PS2 version: when you are in battle against Scout ships, do you ever find it hard to see then due to the size of the ships and colors of the backgrounds? A couple of times I knew they were there but couldn't see them and only way I found where they were is when my cursor turned red when I passed over them.

 

I can't really describe why, because there are many area's of the game that I think could really be improved upon, but I've actually enjoyed the game so far. This has surprised me because I've still got Mass Effect, Mario, and several other games to finish, but I've pushed them all aside to play Conquest. After winning my first battle last night, I'm looking forward to going back and trying the game playing the other races.

 

Like I said in a previous post, not sure about the longevity of the game as it has limited modes. But right now, I'm enjoying it.

 

 

 

Mendon

Edited December 11, 2007 by Mendon

[Gabriel]

Gabriel... I'm playing the Wii version of the game and was wondering about the PS2 version: when you are in battle against Scout ships, do you ever find it hard to see then due to the size of the ships and colors of the backgrounds? A couple of times I knew they were there but couldn't see them and only way I found where they were is when my cursor turned red when I passed over them.

 

I can't really describe why, because there are many area's of the game that I think could really be improved upon, but I've actually enjoyed the game so far. This has surprised me because I've still got Mass Effect, Mario, and several other games to finish, but I've pushed them all aside to play Conquest. After winning my first battle last night, I'm looking forward to going back and trying the game playing the other races.

 

Like I said in a previous post, not sure about the longevity of the game as it has limited modes. But right now, I'm enjoying it.

 

Yes, I have the same problem. The dark scouts (Klingons in particular), are hard to see against the dark backgrounds.

 

On the PS2, there are arrows at the edges of the screen pointing to where offscreen ships are, so that helps to locate scouts as they're preparing for a battle run.

 

The targeting system in the PS2 version works something like an omni-shooter. The right analog stick controls which direction your sensors/guns are pointing. When a target is within this arc, their shield bars become visible. To find scouts, you can waggle your targeting arc around a bit until you see some shield bars pop up and then start firing.

 

Otherwise, you're stuck doing it the old fashioned way of carefully watching for the light colored details of the ship zipping along the starfield.

 

As for the appeal of the game, I have the same feeling. Like you, I feel they stopped short on this one. They had this great foundation, but just didn't bother constructing much on top of it. I think part of the appeal, despite it's unpolished nature, is simply that the game style isn't very common. It isn't often a strategy game pops up which doesn't require tons of bookkeeping and menu navigation as well as being connected to a 40 hour plus storyline involving a fantasy kingdom. In the time it would take to learn how to play Romance of the Three Kingdoms, you can play a full game or two of Conquest. The subject matter doesn't hurt either.

 

Or maybe that's just the Trekkie in me talking.