Starfleet Command Volume II: Empires at War

"Well, I guess..."

This is the next game in the SFC series. This time around, you get to play the Orion Pirates & their ships.
The Pirates each have several cartels (which are mostly alike) that you can control.

There's the Quick Battle mode & Multiplayer.

As for Campaign, there's still that hexfield you manuver around in, & there are sometimes 2 or more missions & you get to pick which one to attempt which is pretty good.

& the campaign mode runs on an engine called ''Dynaverse II'' which is an engine where various missions are selected randomly when you get to a square where you can select the available missions screen.

The game's pretty good, but something I really wish was in the game was option mounts.

In Star Fleet Battles (a board game), you could customize the Orion ships, giving them Photon Torpedoes, Disruptors, & all the other weapons of the game. After all, it's more fun when you get to customize!

I wish they'd have put that in, but it's still a good game & it has some new weapons too including the Heavy Photon Torpedo from Klingon Academy.

Well, now it's time to see how the game does.

Graphics: Good. 8/10
Sound: It was pretty decent. 7/10
Gameplay: If you got over the fact that the Klingons don't have torpedoes in the Star Fleet Command games (except for the two movie era ships in SFCII), you'll have a blast here. 7/10
Control: Nothing too spectacular. 7/10

In the end, I don't really like this one that much. It plays well but I wish they'd put the options in.

Still, if you wan't to figure out whether to get it or not,
I'd say it's a decent buy.

Well, this needs at least 400 words because of the code on this form, so I'm gonna talk about some more parts of the game.

Each race needs you to use various strategies to win.

The Klingons for example usually rely on wearing down the other guy from a distance & then head in to finish them.

And the older Romulan ships need to keep cloaking, decloaking, & unloading Plasma Torpedoes.

So there are various strategies built into each race's ships for various kinds of preference various players have.

A while ago, Interplay got bought out by Activision.
It's a shame. Their entire Star Fleet Command series was pretty good.

Who knows what they might have done? They might have also put in the Tholians & the Andromedans in another expansion!

Still, the Orion Pirates thing lets you finally take control of the cartels which wasn't done before in the series & even though I don't really like it as much as Star Fleet Command II, it's still a good game that's worth playing at least once.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 03/16/02, Updated 03/16/02