Gamers not familiar with the television show on which Star Trek: Deep Space Nine -- Dominion Wars is based, may be a bit puzzled since names of individual people, alien races, ships, political alliances, and other pertinent elements are used regularly without any real explanation. This gives some indication of the intended audience (fans of Star Trek and its many iterations in general) and, in turn, provides some idea of why it's not much fun.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Dominion Wars Review When it's working properly, Dominion Wars still just ends up feeling like a really slick series companion rather than like a full-blown strategy game.
- Dominion Wars (2001) Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Dominion Wars is a real-time strategy game set roughly between Seasons 5 and 7 of Deep Space Nine. The player is tasked with defending Federation assets against attacking Dominion forces.
Dominion: The History of England from the Battle of Waterloo to Victoria's Diamond Jubilee by Peter Ackroyd Oct 9, 2018 4.1 out of 5 stars 10. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Dominion Wars'. Is a strategy game released for Microsoft Windows in 2001. The game was greeted with fairly good reviews, but its frequent lockups, crashes and frequently disappearing saved games were serious problems. 'Trekkies' are a loyal bunch, guaranteeing that many will buy the computer game (or book or movie) simply for that reason, and with the dirge of unsatisfying games bearing the franchise label, Dominion Wars will quickly be just one more disappointment to pile on the ever-growing heap of space junk.
'Trekkies' are a loyal bunch, guaranteeing that many will buy the computer game (or book or movie) simply for that reason, and with the dirge of unsatisfying games bearing the franchise label, Dominion Wars will quickly be just one more disappointment to pile on the ever-growing heap of space junk. The game enforces the question of why is it seemingly so hard to develop a solid Star Trek video game?
Dominion Wars is hampered first and foremost by the very odd and unsatisfying method of controlling your ships. Although the universe is presented in three fabulous dimensions, you can only travel through two of them. It's a situation comparable to being on a tiny day cruiser that pulls up next to a Carnival Cruise ocean behemoth -- the really fancy stuff is right there before your eyes, but you're not going to get any of it.
Star Trek Ds9 Dominion Wars Game
Obviously, creating a RTS game in three dimensions would be unbelievably complicated to design, let alone play, so perhaps the creators can be excused. But, teasing you by offering a look into three dimensions from a perspective behind your ship or fleet, and then permitting you to travel on only one plane, eliminates the potential excitement of real-time maneuvering.
The 20 missions provided for the solo player are linear, yet suffer from a lack of continuity. People who are killed in one scenario show up in the next. Although you can play from the perspective of either the Federation or the Dominion side, all missions have a similar feel to previous space-borne games and offer no areas to go 'where no man has gone before.'
The possibilities for excitement are fairly limited by the restrictions to basically direct flight and attack patterns of a few spaceships. Despite the large range of flight patterns and weapon configurations, combat can usually be won fairly easily by simply isolating ships and attacking them individually, assuming you can locate them all in time, especially without a clear view of the full space battlefield.
Gamers looking for an absorbing and challenging space strategy-combat game won't find much satisfaction in the constraints imposed by the missions of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine -- Dominion Wars. With no skirmish mode and limited strategic movement allowed the fleet of ships, there's simply not enough warp drive to please more than the most devoted Star Trek: Deep Space Nine fans.
Graphics: The ships and planets are satisfyingly detailed, and the movie-like quality is good in the short term. Camera angles are usually effective.
Deep Space Nine Dominion Wars Game
Sound: Sounds from the television show are decently reproduced, and the music is above average.
Play sonic exe 1 2. Enjoyment: The non-intuitive controls stop the game in its tracks. Often, three-key combinations are required to perform simple tasks, and the sheer number of controls to commit to memory make any sort of real time action difficult with no pause mode during combat. Linearity of the missions is hurt by the discontinuity of individuals who come back to life. It's like playing a bunch of disjointed scenarios.
Replay Value: Missions are too similar to each other to warrant a replay of most, and the linearity leaves little new to achieve during a replay. A bonus program, Star Trek: Starship Creator Warp II, allows you to design certain new ship types, but suffers from integration problems with Dominion Wars, and is useless in solo play.
The Dominion Deep Space 9
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Star Trek: Armada 2, Star Trek: Armada, Star Trek: Starfleet Command 3, Star Trek: Legacy, Star Trek: Bridge Commander, Star Trek: New Worlds, Star Trek: Away Team, Star Trek: Elite Force 2
When it's working properly, Dominion Wars still just ends up feeling like a really slick series companion rather than like a full-blown strategy game.
By Bruce Grey on
If it's not one thing, it's another. The curse that haunts Star Trek computer games may or may not have had anything to do with the state of Dominion Wars upon release, but whatever the cause, the game could have stood a few more weeks in the engineering bay. Lockups, crashes, bizarre video effects, saved games that disappear for no reason--all of these issues plagued the game when it hit store shelves. Judging by the list of fixes, the problems with the initial version were even more extensive. Strangely, some users are reporting more problems after the patch (if that's even possible), but for most gamers Dominion Wars v1.02 works pretty well from a technical standpoint. Unfortunately, the simple gameplay is a bit more problematic.
Dominion Wars is set in the familiar Deep Space Nine universe, and it lets you control up to six ships of various classes and play through the war in Alpha Quadrant from either the Federation or Dominion sides. These campaigns consist of linked missions that earn you credits upon completion, which you use to purchase more powerful ships, more skilled captains, extra crew, new weapons, and what have you. While the missions are interesting, and the storyline does a good job of developing the television series (as the Federation, for example, you'll have to initially abandon Deep Space Nine and then eventually mount an offensive to recapture it), it suffers from a lack of continuity (in that captains killed during a mission are still available for future missions) and a linearity that makes replay unattractive. This linearity wouldn't be such a problem, except that Dominion Wars has no skirmish mode except for multiplayer, and this leaves gamers, who prefer to play solo, with little reason to return after completion.
Dominion Wars shares some gameplay elements with Interplay's Starfleet Command series, but whereas the Interplay games are really hard-core strategy games set in real time, Dominion Wars feels more like an action game. This is because Dominion Wars doesn't even attempt to model the level of detail present in Starfleet Command. As a result, you're less involved in micromanagement and thus have more time to plot general fleet strategy. The odd thing is that even with so many ships under your control (up to six, as opposed to the maximum of three in Starfleet Command), there really isn't much specific fleet management capability apart from grouping ships--there are no formations, for instance. While you can slow Dominion Wars down, it clearly wasn't meant to be played at a crawl: The cinematic nature of the game, with its tremendous explosions, moving cameras, and dramatic flybys, loses a lot of appeal if played much slower than the default speed. This is clearly why Dominion Wars went light on the strategy, since trying to manage the details of six ships with the game's interface would be a disaster, especially since you can't pause to give orders.
This movielike quality is probably Dominion Wars' strongest point: The graphics, music, sound effects, and camera direction all build an excellent atmosphere, which carries the game along quite well for a while. But once you get beyond that, the strategy elements start to wear a little thin. The game apparently compensates by making some of the missions quite difficult so that you'll have to defeat forces far superior to your own. Equipping your vessels with extra goodies like upgraded shields and extended phasers helps, but that happens between missions. General ship strategies (like circling the enemy or sniping from long range) can be assigned to individual vessels, but those who want to micromanage a battle will find themselves frustrated. Those who like good documentation will likewise be frustrated, since the CD booklet that tries to pass for a manual is embarrassingly thin.
For a full-priced game, Dominion Wars feels a bit hollow. The lack of skirmish mode is a notable problem, although the game does come with a copy of Star Trek: Starship Creator Warp II, which can be used to design new Defiant-, Galaxy-, Akira-, and B'rel-class starships for use in multiplayer. However, these are the only classes that can be imported, and once again they are useless if you're not planning any multiplayer games. Furthermore, the technical issues with the game extend to importing starships, and even with the patch, this tends to cause problems. You can also use Starship Creator Warp II to script your own custom missions. Even so, when it's working properly, Dominion Wars still just ends up feeling like a really slick series companion rather than like a full-blown strategy game.
Dominion Wars does a nice job of capturing the feel of the Deep Space Nine universe, and the show's fans will find a lot to like about it as a result. But gamers who are interested in a general space strategy game might find the strategy elements a bit thin. If you're a big fan of Deep Space Nine and just want to fight for the future of Alpha Quadrant, and you also have some patience with potential technical problems, Dominion Wars is worthwhile. But if you want a comprehensive space combat strategy game, you should look elsewhere.