A Star Trek game that focuses on ship-to-ship combat, contains content from all five-television shows and the real voices of every captain should be a fan's wet dream. Unfortunately, Star Trek Legacy manages to screw things up in almost every way.

The story starts in Jonathan Archer's era during the early formation of the Federation. A rogue Vulcan scientist named T'Uerell has discovered a new way to live long and prosper as a Borg Queen. Vulcans live for centuries, leaving room for each starship captain to eventually encounter the Borg Queen at some point in their career. Players command up to four Federation starships, including the signature ones from the respective shows (Enterprise, Voyager and the Defiant). Each wonderfully detailed craft looks great when cruising through the blackness of space. And those details continue as ships take on battle damage, with scorch marks, smoke and broken hulls.

There are a handful of great control schemes out there, dating as far back as Wing Commander IV and Freelancer. Yet, Legacy's developers settled on the worst possible setup, a setup that players must immediately learn without a tutorial.

Simply put, the keyboard directs the ship's movements like a first-person shooter while the mouse moves the camera around (equating the two to a console controller), but this scarcely describes how difficult maneuvering a ship can be. There are keys to select the closest target and another to pursue and move into firing position, but the ship only gives a short chase before it forgets what it's going after. It's also easy to lose sight of foes, since the targeting reticule doesn't properly highlight or track targets. The manual target selection should be as easy as a point-and-click, but instead, players need to move the camera around until an enemy happens to fall into a fixed set of crosshairs. One minute, players chase ships, and the next, they run headlong toward an absurdly disproportioned planet. There's supposed to be a way to target subsystems such as engines and weapons, but this feature doesn't work. Star Trek Legacy doesn't even realize it takes place in outer space, since ships are incapable of making loops, moving in reverse, slingshotting with a planet's gravity or strafing sideways using inertia. Ships fire phasers in a 360-degree horizontal radius and launch torpedoes from forward or rear tubes, but become useless when enemies fly directly above or below them.