A good game, which tries to merge two game styles, partially succeeding
Gameplay: Campaign Mode - turn based strategy - In this mode, you try to expand your empire with the goal of defeating all your enemies and take over the entire map. Here, you create fleets of ships led by an admiral (maximum of 3 fleets of 7 ships each at one time) to conquer other star systems. When you move your fleet to a star system, you fight it out in the arcade (or you can sim the battle for quicker results). In addition, you build starbases, defense platforms, mining colonies, and research labs (only those 4 types of structures are available) to improve and increase various types of resources. I've played the early versions of Civilization and SimCity on the PC in the '90s and and this mode in ST:C is pretty rudimentary. However, the AI is challenging and will play a pretty good game. There were several times my fleet took over a star system by defeating the "native" race and my enemy then kicked me out. There are various superweapons available to each race to build/use. There are a total of 7, of which 3 are available to each race.
Gameplay: Campaign Mode - arcade - This is a stripped down version of Star Trek: Encounters (ST:E, arcade PS2 game Bethesda released last year). The two things that are not included in ST:C that was in Encounters is the ability to lock onto multiple targets and to go above/below the plane of flight (the y axis). Other than that, the two are very similar. The best thing about ST:C is that there's no flying through hoops like in ST:E. Also you can sim the battle if you don't want to play it. I did notice the developer did improve the scale of the ships. For example, in ST:E, the Enterprise was the same size as a Xindi ship but in ST:C, the Xindi ship (correctly) is much smaller. Same with Ferengi ships. The targeting has also changed and is a bit more simpler. If an enemy ship/facility is in your targeting slice and if you fire phasers, the phasers will autotarget the enemy. The photon torpedos don't do that - they go down the slice but there is a 'ship's momentum' component to where the torpedos end up.
The major addition is the ability to have battles with you commanding multiship fleets. It's more exciting - seeing all the various ships fight it out. It reminds me of some of the great ship battles from DS9's Dominion war arc. Unfortunately, you only control one ship in your fleet (and jump to another one if/when your ship is destroyed). It would've been nice to have more fleet commands besides the 3 that's available (offensive, defensive and neutral). As your admirals win battles, they get experience points and eventually get promoted (as long as they don't get killed), which improves their performance. This is also not a long game - you can finish a campaign in an hour or two, depending on the difficulty and the number of enemies you start with.
In addition to the Campaign mode, there is a skirmish mode in which you set up an ad hoc battle. You set up the two races/admirals and set up the composition of the fleet (max of 7 ships), set up any facilities and background (e.g. sun, asteroid field, etc) and start blasting away. It's similar to the skirmish in ST:E but it's better here because you can have multi ship fleets, not just one ship. When you finish various campaigns, you unlock additional options for use in skirmish mode.
Story: There isn't any story in this game. The opening screen said that all alliances are forgotten and each race is out for themselves.
Sound: The ship's sound effects (firing of weapons, weapons hitting shields) are very good. However, the voiceovers are limited to only single sentences/phases that are blurt out (e.g. "Death to the Klingons" and the like) and repeated very frequently. Also, while there is some new music, some of the themes were reused from ST:E and Star Trek: Tactical Assault (that's one way to keep the price low). Some of those repeats are stuck in my head!
Graphics: The graphics in this game are adequate, not great. The arcade mode shows ship battles in an angled view, somewhere between 3D and 2D. The strategy part is mainly composed of menus that you use to build up your stations/ships. One nice touch is that the menu design change depending on the race you choose. For example, if you play the Federation, you get the menus that look like they came from TNG's Enterprise or Voyager.
Summary: Overall, this is a game worth buying, especially since it's a budget title (will cost around $15 - $20). It tries to be a "pick up and play" game and for the most part, it succeeds. One thing I feel can be improved was that the developer took parts of ST:E and added some basic turn based strategy aspects but each part, in itself, lacks depth. However, this gives armchair admirals who are "twitch-challenged" (like me) a chance to play a game which is not dependent on button mashing and quick reflexes. Quality Star Trek console games (actually, any Trek console games) have been rare of late and while this game is not a must have, it does offer some diversion for the Trek fan.