This is not some kind of simulator back at the Academy, where your actions amount to passing or failing an exam. In this game, command is thrust upon you-a junior officer-when the ship you are serving aboard gets caught in a mysterious stellar catastrophe. The resulting death of your captain, the destruction of the ship, and your lucky survival jumps you to a command of your very own.

Wet behind the ears and with an untested crew, you are tasked with the responsibility of finding out the cause of this massive explosion. In the first-person bridge view, you are essentially an immobile and mute captain The Captain Pike Sim, as the folks at Activision like to call it. In easy mode, the surrounding bridge crew will carry out your every command. Face a bridge officer and a list of commands will pop up for you to chose.

Each officer has his or her own specialty AI weapons officer, science officer, navigator, etc. You will retain the same crew during the course of your missions and will learn more and more about their personality, weaknesses, and strengths as the game progresses-using each to effect the best solution to a problem is one of the skills a captain must master.

SHAMS 3 points. This game is so much fun! Just grab the preinstalled version. It works with Windows 10 64bit. JimmyWilson69 -2 points. Trying to run this on Win 64bit, pre-installed version Tries to run, looks promising, and then back to desktop with no warnings. Anyone got any advice? Slayer 0 point. Kate 1 point. AnonymousGamer -6 points. MrNobody 1 point. Borgdronez -5 points. The installer doesn't work on Windows 10 64bit.

I had to download the installed version but can't install mods without the necessary registry keys. Does anyone know what keys I need to add? Metaspoilt -3 points. Dealing with. StarfleetPicard 0 point. Raja Farhan 0 point. IceLancer 0 point. Needless to say that at some point, very soon after Picard is dropped off in actual fact, the universe needs to be saved and it's you rather than he that will have to do the saving, which is probably something of a relief for the man.

And so the real game begins, as Star Trek often does, with a series of mysterious attacks on a variety of ships, this time within and around a temperamental area of vacuum called the Maelstrom, which as it happens, the Vesuvi system is a part of.

Your task then is to find out who is doing the attacking, why, and what the Vesuvi explosion has got to do with it. Effectively all you are doing is warping in to system after system, occasionally scanning the odd planet and usually blowing away all the ships you come across into dust. There would be nothing wrong with that if this was Wing Commander, Freespace, or indeed Star Wars, but being a Star Trek game it feels wrong that you never get the chance to bend a few rules and take matters into your own hands from time to time.

Of course, the natural chain of command dictates that you follow orders and in turn your crew follow yours, but how many Star Trek captains do you know who follow every order to the letter?

Answer: only the boring ones that no-one remembers. What Bridge Commander needs are a few choices in the game; some opportunities to take short cuts, use some initiative, take a few risks or even disregard orders altogether if it means there is a chance of greater success further down the road. As it is, the game feels far too structured in that there is rarely more than one option open to you - which as I say is fine for a combat game, which this primarily is, but for that Star Trek dimension needs something extra - freedom to make decisions of your own outside the sphere of combat.

The game is excessively linear but paradoxically because of this, Bridge Commander is a superb game, and one that has managed to capture the fluid nature of Star Trek's ship-to-ship combat like no computer game before. It's this same feature that in B The Mighty 8th made for such an engaging flight simulation; to actually see and interact with your crew made you more protective of them, even on a very crude and basic level, especially when you are placed in the world alongside them.

The main reason for Bridge Commander's success at transferring Star Trek's more static combat to the PC screen has to do with how the developer has handled the interface.

In the past you might have controlled your ship by handholding your crew in other words, you probably had to do everything yourself. Here however, you can pretty much leave them to it and issue orders whenever you see fit. It may sound like things are being taken out of your hands, but in actual fact it allows you to look at the bigger picture: keep an eye on other ships, re-allocate power settings and transfer repair crews to fix torpedo tubes if needed.

Of course, you can take direct control of helm or tactical if you so wish; speed up, turn left among other more exotic directions , target phasers and torpedos and so on. In fact, as the game progresses you sometimes do need to take over, but it never feels overwhelming as it did in Klingon Academy ,. You can use this to issue orders as they were meant to be - by the power of the spoken word, while keeping your digits free for other things. Certainly as the game grinds on, you will use the first-person bridge view less and less, and rely more on the outside camera views.

Certainly it helps things that Bridge Commander is a very attractive game, with the deep space backdrops, brushed with spiralling nebulae and clawed dust clouds adding depth and colour where typically there is none.

The ships too look the part, especially in terms of scale as you manoeuvre out of a starbase after J some much-needed I repairs. The telling spikes of Photon torpedos arc convincingly through the void and inside the ships themselves the characters move and look fairly convincing, until they open their lips to show a frightening black space where teeth and gums should be - not pretty.

The game does have other graphical oddities. There are other niggles that are initially disappointing but soon lose importance. The music is repetitive, yet turn it off and the bridge becomes ominously silent thanks to a complete lack of background noise. Voices too can become jumbled as you quickly give out orders and everyone ends up speaking at the same time. Top of the league of little niggles however is the savegame feature, which in true console fashion, is automatic after every second or third mission.

No doubt the game would be too easy if you could save whenever you wanted to, after every mission? Who knows, but as you can imagine, having fought to the end of a third successive battle only to lose it and go back to the beginning, is frustrating in the extreme. However, thanks to the addictive qualities of the battles, after a quick cup of Earl Grey I was back at the helm having forgotten the previous annoyance.

Despite the ridiculous uniforms and grating political correctness of the TV shows, Star Trek has always been unrivalled in science fiction when it comes to offering a complete universe to get lost in. Whether at the behest of Star Trek owners Paramount or a design decision, Bridge Commander suffers slightly in that none of your crew ever become injured.

Yet throughout the course of the game, you will probably destroy more than enemy ships probably more than Kirk and Picard ever did combined. But why not kill off, or at least injure some of your crew?

It would have added another dimension to the game. Say a grizzly doctor arrives on the bridge to take away your injured helmsman, you then have the problem of drafting in an understudy or taking over the station yourself. You could then add an RPG element to the proceedings Ah well, maybe the sequel Despite only having a hundred or so regular online players. Bridge Commander is a game best played against a handful of opponents.

Perhaps it's just as well, for although there is a mod that allows up to 16 people to fight it out across the emptiness of deep space, whether you want to or not, eight is the maximum and four the average - hardly what you might call all-out war. However, for a quick scrap, Bridge Commander is no less entertaining for it. Unfortunately finding a 'clean' game is something of a chore. Most servers are running mods, scripts or in some cases cheats and require you to download extra files, which is fine in the short term, but could mean you getting kicked out if you try joining another server which isn't running them.

Some people get around this by installing two versions of the game; one where they allow extra downloads, another where they don't, but this doesn't get around the fact that Bridge Commander players have been left to their own devices and it's a community that could do with some policing. That said, Bridge Commander online is just as good in combat as the single-player game. The interface and controls are identical and the thrill of destroying a real opponent much more satisfying although be prepared for accusations of cheating if you win.

One minor quibble is that it's not uncommon to play against the same vessels time after time, which is fair enough as everyone wants to win so it helps to use the best ships on offer, but it's something the developers could have easily avoided by offering more mission objectives or limiting the numbers of a particular ship in a game.

I know this game is basically abondonware now, but please add to GOG if possible. Well everyone loving this game should know that this game is currently Abandoneware thus officially you cannot go to company and request rights to sell this game. Due to that it is not easy if not impossible to add this game here. Thus currently only possibility is MyAbandoneware site or similar as license already expired. Still i think this game is better than Bridge Crew, but i can see possible development BC commander way for BC Crew if they would get it right we might get something nice from Ubisoft.

Would love to see this one avail; there were some awesome mods back in the day too for this! Why is this game not available anywhere for digital download? One of the best games which make you really feel like you are in command of a starship. Hope we see this Please get this. One of the best Star Trek games, but my copy long ago disappeared. Why is there not another game like this?