Over the years, many games attempted to capture the essence of Gene Rodenberry's popular Star Trek franchise and failed miserably. Bethesda Softworks swore to turn that around with Star Trek Legacy for the Xbox 360 and PC. The company promised bold new steps, by spanning across multiple eras of the Star Trek universe. Unfortunately, the 360 game falters just as bad as the PC version.

The game starts on a good note, as players control a first-timer vessel and take on Romulans in an opening battle. Over the course of the game, new ships, power-ups, and even a few familiar faces from the Star Trek lexicon come into play -- including Captain Janeway, Picard and James T. Kirk. However, it only takes a few minutes to realize that the control set-up doesn't work nearly as well as it should.

Players rotate their craft around the star system, navigating to different goals and activating warp speed to get around faster. Unfortunately, each ship controls like a big, lumbering Oldsmobile instead of a slick Starfleet ride. Reaching certain destinations takes a while -- even at warp speed. During battles, players access weapons such as phasers, photon torpedoes and other toys, which come in handy for blasting nasty Klingons, Romulans and the Borg. In spite of such firepower, however, the battles usually end up the same, with very little fulfillment in destroying these enemies.
Even worse, the targeting system leaves players wide open for damage. Players look around freely by using the right analog stick, keeping an eye all around their ship. However, targeting enemies during fly-bys and keeping them locked on gets quite strenuous. Furthermore, players cannot see in what's in front of them while targeting, which proves to be fatal while navigating through an asteroid field.

A limited amount of save checkpoints further ruins the game. Players experience many battles and lots of exploration throughout each mission, but the lack of save points results in heavy doses of frustration. Say a player makes some progress working their way to a Klingon vessel in the hopes to take it over. Then, in the middle of a battle, they die. Then they restart the level from the beginning. How hard would it have been to put together some kind of auto-save system, Bethesda? The lack of briefings and a helpful tutorial don't help either.