Star Command Review

Star Command is a sci-fi simulation game that clearly takes cues from Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek universe. Although the game takes a few missteps in parts of its design, the whole package is so charming that it hardly matters. Anyone wanting a good Trek-like combat experience should stop reading this review and go buy it now.

For everyone else, here's how Star Command plays: Players begin by choosing a captain and a ship to command. From here, an in game tutorial gives just enough information on hiring crew members, building rooms on your ship, and how combat works, and then promptly throws you into the thick of it. Before you know it, you'll be commanding your engineers to put out fires by sick bay while your weapons crew has to abandon their battle stations to combat enemy aliens that have beamed aboard.

The core fun to be had in Star Command is specifically with how each of these combat scenario plays out. Each encounter feels very much like a desperate struggle pulled from a sci-fi TV show, with players struggling to maintain operations aboard their own ship while also defeating their opponent. To add to this dramatic feeling, Star Command also creates a highly detailed, science fiction world, but then undercuts much of its drama with a lot of humorous descriptions and dialogue. This makes the world of Star Command a pleasure to play in.

Between missions, players can upgrade their ship and recruit new cadets to replace the ones that got sucked out of an airlock or were eviscerated by space zombies. While the downtime is somewhat of a welcome relief from combat, it feels like there isn't a whole lot to do except prep for the next battle. For being a Trek-inspired game, I was kind of hoping for there to be more intergalactic politicking involved, but the combat is so good and intense that I am satisfied regardless. As a more legitimate knock against this game, I'd say the isometric view can sometimes make the tapping crew members accurately a pain, but again, this is a small gripe in the grand scheme of things.

Overall, Star Command is a great space sim that injects a ton of real-time strategy elements to make it a ton of fun to play, regardless of your affinity for Star Trek.