Dominion Wars Review
Deep Space Nine Dominion Wars Review.
DO NOT BUY THIS GAME!
Strategy - Space Simulation
Grade D-
You've undoubtedly heard that Dominion War has come out with many bugs. You have probably heard that a patch came out to patch the bugs. But what you may not have heard is that this game still is awful!
Let's start at the beginning. The opening cut scene for this game is incredible--showing a battle between Federation, Klingon, Cardassian, and Jem Hadar ships worthy of a real DS9 episode or an X Wing v. Tie Fighter game. Unfortunately, this opening scene is all Dominion Wars has going for it.
The problems begin when you try to change the key settings--you can't. You can, however, adjust difficulty and volume controls.
The game starts off by giving you a choice of fighting on the side of the Federation (and the Klingons) or the Jem Hadar (and the Cardassians). That's the last clear and easy to understand choice you'll make in this game.
Then you go to the mission briefing and are prompted to select and outfit your ships. The ship and crew select screens are very unintuitive. Most of the clickable parts of the screen are unlabeled; after adding a component to a ship, it's unclear how to "unadd it" if you've changed your mind. Because it wasn't clear how to select a certain item, I often found myself unselecting a ship I wanted, or selecting too much of an item. It would have been more helpful if the outfitting screen clearly had add and subtract buttons.
But the outfitting screen was a piece of cake compared to the actual game. You generally control from 1-6 ships per mission, and have the ability to take in the view from each ship, give individual commands to each ship, or to groups of ships. The method of giving commands to a ship is easy enough--select a ship, and select a command.
It's at this point that the system breaks down. Most of the important commands are hidden in a menu in the lower right hand corner that's heiroglyphics, as far as I'm concerned. It's difficult to make heads or tails of a pictoral menu while your ship is getting phasored. Furthermore, a lot of the important menu options are hidden in a second pictoral menu behind the first one.
But the biggest problem is the camera. The instructions say you can adjust the view with the up, down, left and right buttons. WHAT ARE THE UP, DOWN, LEFT, AND RIGHT BUTTONS? I tried everything--arrow keys, etc., but could never find them. And since I couldn't rebind those keys, I could never adjust the view; I could only see straight ahead! Even the zoom in and zoom out keys for the view didn't work. And herein lay the real problem; because you can't "look around" so to speak, you're dead meat for ambushes, and your response time to attacks are greatly slowed. The inability to look around is what totally ruined this game.
Graphics: A
The graphics (and sounds) are top knotch--star fields, ships, phaser shots, etc. If it were a movie, it would be great.
Interface: F
Someday a team of scientists will create an easy to use interface for a Starfleet strategic simulation. Until then I have this suggestion--have menus labeled with WORDS, not cryptic pictures. If there are too many commands, put the most important ones at the top level, and use javascript (remember javascript?) to make a second level of them, like the Start menu-->Program schemes.
But the interface really gets an F because the camera controls don't work. You can only like this game if you enjoy having to move in a certain direction to see that direction. (I played, by the way, with patch version 1.03 installed).
Difficulty: A mixed bag; the first few missions are easy, but I got stuck on one where the Defiant had to blow up a sensor relay. I kept getting attacked from a direction where I couldn't see the enemy coming. It was also a classic "puzzle" style mission, and with the camera mode not functioning I didn't have the patience to figure out the puzzle; the interface was puzzle enough.
Documentation: I was startled to read in the readme file that much of the skimpy manual was outdated and wrong. This game was really a clunker.
Overall: D-
I don't give it an F only because the opening cut scene was good.
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