The cast and crew are all in there, for what it's worth, and, along with more than 20 different classes of starships, including several original, never-before-seen designs created exclusively for the game. Extensive space battles are the order of the day then, and before entering into the fray, you can select your fleet and appoint commanders to each ship as well as crew and weaponry. It's essentially a strategy game set in space, and if we wanted to pigeonhole it, we could uncomfortably describe it as Homeworld in Deep Space Nine trousers, which it isn't, since resource-management is kept to keeping your crew alive rather that spending an age boring through rocks. However, by space combat, don't expect to leap into the cockpit of a craft and start giving your joystick a battering. Having played a pre-beta version of the final game, we can confirm that it is realtime, there is a great deal of space combat, and a degree of strategy is required. Set within a faithfully replicated Deep Space Nine universe (which some aficionados might concede is the worst series), Dominion Wars ambitiously describes itself as a realtime space combat strategy. In fact, the closest I get to any of that nonsense is flicking through a copy of PC, which tragically appears to be transforming itself into a thinly veiled Star Trek tribute magazine. As for your Next Generations, Voyagers and Deep Space Nines, it's all a bit of a mystery. I could probably pick out a Klingon from a line-up, and I believe the actor Patrick Stewart is involved somewhere. As for the new stuff, I would scarcely know where to start. The truth is, if there's absolutely nothing else on, I might entertain watching the original series, although the kitsch/nostalgic appeal still wears thin over the course of an entire episode. It may have been implied within these pages that Star Trek is not my favourite thing, and the occasional poorly written piece of hate mail would appear to add credence to this theory. So listen up Trekkies, Trekkoids, whatever you call yourselves: get a grip, get a shave, and take a bath. If we had another quid for every anal buffoon who writes in with some pedantic comment about misrepresentation of phasers or incorrectly used apostrophes, we'd probably be able to throw in a few beers as well. If we had a quid for every substandard Star Trek game that washed up on these shores, we'd probably be able to send out for pizzas, and maybe even have some change left over. Two words that hang over the PC games industry like so much bad air.

Star trek dominion war episodes