Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Dominion Wars

THE BAD:
This game has a massive amount of bugs, even after the latest series of patches that are included. These bugs are varied, sometimes stopping missions halfway through when certain objectives become impossible, or not allowing you to play the level at all.

There is very little chance for micromanagement in the game, with few fleet based commands available. When some of your fleets are being chosen, the choices that the commander chooses sometimes forces you to remake your entire fleet, or go and chance it, which I ended up doing quite often in the later levels.

SUMMARY:
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Dominion Wars was a game that had been in waiting for a long time. While the Star Trek genre had gone from such things as armadas of ships that you commanded from missions on one ship, it had yet to have such tactical and strategic games as this one under your belt.

The entire plot to the game is that, as a small fleet commander, it's your job to lead your crews, captains, and vessels into combat against the usually overwhelming forces of the enemy, as either the Dominion/Cardassian alliance or as the Federation and Klingons. Throughout the levels on the side of the Federation, you work to combat the vessels of the opposing faction as the Dominion War progresses, from the hectic evacuation from DS9 to the protection of the Arrays that are heavily assisting the war effort. While some of what you do does have to do with the story, we get to see some missions that were not mentioned in the show, giving you a chance to more delve into the universe instead of the show.

As the Dominion, on the other hand, things vary from the show a bit. While you do get to irradicate the Maquis and their transports (quite an easy mission) to finally finishing off the combined fleets of all allied vessels (I especially enjoyed that level), after about level three, whatever it had to do with the Star trek universe we know is over. The finality of that ending is excellent, and gratifying.

I do have a number of problems with this game, however. From watching the show, you would never have thought that torpedo banks took that long to reload and that phasers take so long to recharge. While trying not to weight the options to heavily to one side, I find the lack of firepower in all ships a little dissapointing, especially when it takes a full minute to finish of a Maquis attack vessel when I'm sure a Dominion Strike Cruiser could have done it in ten seconds with all the weapons they had in the show.

While you do have a good number of ships at your command, I did find myself yearning for more after a while. I tend to find that I had an easy time with them as a fleet, and swept the map more often by sending off ships alone to handle a group than anything. The lack of fleet controls was a major dissapointment, since I had expected to be able to micromanage to extraordiary levels -- it is supposed to be a Star Trek game after all.

When maing these ships, you use a credit system to allow you to pick captains (ranging in experience and commendations), amounts of crew (more security for transport related conflicts, for example, or engineers to repair ships that much faster) and the ships themselves, ranging from the rather little armed Saber class sabre class vessel to the massively powerful Galaxy class vessel, and everything in between. Along with that, we also get the chance to use some especially powerful weapons or additions to our ships that we can buy and store in our cargo bay, including such things as antimatter mines and phaswer upgrades, which tend to be especially useful later on when taking down an enemy vessel quickly is the key.

The twenty campaigns available for play do vary in type and what you need to do for each, and rarely do these levels copy themselves over into another level. These levels tend to complement each other, however, I did not like how I had to shift around part of my fleet each level or so. Perhaps it is the sentimental part of it, but removing ships from a fleet and getting an experienced captain or commander at the helm of bigger and better vessels, and then having to get rid of the ship they are commanding for another one, makes transitions in some levels difficult.

The game is not hard on the eyes, though. The game treats you to 3D graphics that are excellent for the time that this was made, including some very nice nebulas and the ability to see any ship on the map, as long as they are in sensor range, with multiple views. The ships are nicely rendered and transferred into the game nicely, although they could have done a little work on how the ships turn to do conflict or go in a different direction.

Finally, the bugs. Dominion Wars is riddled with more than their should be, especially in all the pre-patched versions. I find that the game slows down, strange graphics appear on the screen, or things I destroy stay around for a while, or never dissapear, which is frustrating when it is part of your mission to get rid of those.

In conclusion, if you're a Star Trek fan, this is a game for you. While buggy, it emhances the Star Trek universe in multiple fashions, which is always a treat. For those of you who might not like Star Trek, it still is a fairly entertaining strategy game.