Page 2 of 2
Gameplay
Click to enlarge |
The lack of base-building, or any resource management whatsoever, will shift your attention away from making and maintaining financial decisions - as is common with other real-time strategy games - to making purely tactical choices. Dominion Wars will punish you for losing ships by making the units you control much more personal. Each of your ships will be piloted by a unique captain who'll have characteristics that directly affect the way his ship behaves. For instance, a ship piloted by a captain with an engineering background will repair itself faster during combat. A ship under the control of a seasoned veteran will maneuver faster and find a target quicker. As your captains gain experience, their respective skills will improve, in turn improving their ships' characteristics. So it'll behoove you to keep your units alive from mission to mission.
Dominion Wars will also let you import ships from Simon & Schuster's Starship Creator: Warp 2, an upcoming desktop game in which you can create and customize Star Trek ships and captains to your liking. You'll be able to import four of these ships - a Galaxy class warship, an Akira class ship, the B'rel, and the Defiant - for use in Dominion Wars. You can even import a picture of yourself to be the captain from Warp 2.
Click to enlarge |
Powering the game is a proprietary 3D engine that'll give you full control of the perspective camera. Even though the default camera angle is a fixed at third-person view, the engine will let you rotate, pan, and zoom the camera to your liking to get a better feel for your surroundings. Additionally, you can switch to a "strategy" view, which moves the camera to an isometric position, giving you a wider angle of the battlefield.
There's certainly no lack of game-design experience at Gizmo. Even though Dominion Wars will be the company's first game, members of the team have developed a number of Activision classics such as Dark Reign, MechWarrior 2, and Heavy Gear. Additionally, the game's lead designer, Tim Ryan, was responsible for MechCommander, which was one of Gizmo's inspirations for Dominion Wars. Currently, the team of 12 at Gizmo is busy modeling the ships, hammering out the AI and game logic, and putting the finishing touches on the campaigns. Dominion Wars should be out in time for this year's holiday festivities, and it will be the second Star Trek game to bear the Deep Space Nine license. If Wagner's prophecies come true, both gamers and Star Trek fans alike will have something to look forward to this Christmas.
Next: More GameSpot previews
Next: GameSpot's Star Trek feature
|
