It's not exactly the most advanced 3D engine in the world, but it gets the job done, and looks good doing it. I only wish you could get a more 3D perspective out of it. There are multiple camera positions, but none that really look "real." Though for the type of game it is, I think looking at it "real" would get you killed. Just pretend what you're looking at is a sensor sweep. Nevertheless, it's a fairly nice looking engine.

Well, the music is excellent, All voice-overs, including George Tekai's are excellent, and the general sound effects are well orchestrated. There is one minor flaw that it would take a hard-core Trekkie to figure out, but some of the sounds are the wrong sounds. Granted, it sound far better the way it is, but as a prime example, the Red and Yellow Alert sounds are stolen from the Enterprise-D, rather than the proper Enterprise-A sound.

If the past three pages didn't convey this point, I don't know what will. The gameplay plays just like you're on a starship, and requires just as much thought. It should be required training at the Academy, let alone installed on everyone's computers.

Without a doubt, it is one of the deepest games to ever exist. Not so much in the storyline area, where depth scores are normally derived from, but in overall complexity and intricacy. It is certainly unrivaled at it's ability to reveal a new strategy even years later.

For most avid fans of SFB and SFC1, multiplayer is the whole reason to own the game. Definitely, just as in SFC1, it carries through. You can go on for hours pummeling away at each others shields, and for two extremely good players to go head to head, prepare to be there for some time. It's like watching Kahn v. Kirk in real life. I take one point away from a slight instability in the multiplayer (and in the game overall), where it has a tendency to crash, though that may be patched relatively soon. SFC/2 is a really hard game to find bugs and patch them as there is just so much detail to the game, that means all the more places for something to go wrong. I'm certainly glad I'm not the one who has to track down the bugs.