![]() ![]() You also have to repair systems, but that involves little more than a lot of watching progress bars fill up, with no opportunity to feel like a miracle worker. The engineer has the job of allocating power to different systems, at least, but that station doesn’t even have a sensor screen to see what’s going on (presumably so that you have to listen for your crewmates calling out for more power). Even when you answer a hail and talk to an ally or enemy captain on screen, there’s never a dialogue choice or decision to be made. The captain, meanwhile, has very little to do except shout out ideas for what they should do and hope the crew feels like following orders. Another issue is that most of the job of combat falls on the helm and tactical positions: helm steers and keeps enemies in your 180-degree phaser arc while tactical scans and fires phasers and torpedoes. And in multi-ship battles, there’s no way to coordinate with other Starfleet ships, so you can’t even prioritize targets effectively. The most complexity I’ve seen is when you disable a larger Warbird’s weapons while going after a smaller Bird of Prey to quickly reduce the number of enemies firing at you. ![]() There are few enemy ship types to deal with and no significant difference in how to handle them: scan them, disrupt their systems (which can disable shields, weapons, or engines for a few moments), and fire away. You don’t have to keep your strongest shields toward the enemy or try to hit their weakest ones because there’s only one shield strength number for your whole ship (and there’s no way for the engineer to recharge them in combat, either). There’s no need to rotate through phaser arcs as they charge because there’s only one. And while it’s not always easy to win, it’s disappointingly simple, especially relative to older Star Trek combat simulations like Bridge Commander or Starfleet Command. ![]() “About 80% of what you’re doing in Bridge Crew’s missions is combat with Klingon ships, or trying to steer around enemies in low-power mode to avoid detection. (Nerdy side note: for all of the technical accuracy in this game it's bewildering that it refers to short warp jumps between locations in the same solar system as "impulse." That's not how that works!) That creates good roleplaying moments even among people who aren’t into that sort of thing. The engineer has to charge warp coils before the helmsman can engage, the tactical officer has to scan an anomaly so the helmsman knows whether to avoid it, and whoever’s operating the transporter can call out how much longer they need the shields to remain down. Because many of the basic work of operating a starship is made up of multi-part tasks, elements of which are divided between stations, there has to be a fair amount of interplay between crewmembers. Especially during the first couple of times playing through the handful of available half-hour missions, Bridge Crew is a little bit magical – it’s like living out a classic Star Trek blooper reel where Scotty forgets to turn on the warp drive, Chekov can’t figure out how the shields work, and Spock’s head turns around almost 180 degrees. ![]() Sure, you can do some hardcore roleplaying if you like, but in my experience playing with both friends and random matches the mood on the bridge quickly becomes that of a comedy. But Bridge Crew isn’t really about serious simulation in the first place – it feels more like an elaborate theme park ride. “Character models and effects (like the fires that start around the bridge when you take damage) are a lot less attractive than the ship itself and don’t do much to help immersion. ![]()
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