Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Dominion Wars

May 3, 2002

Price: $5 (full retail packaging)

So what is in the Beta Quadrant
besides Romulans, anyway?

On one hand, it is somewhat surprising that the Deep Space Nine license spawned two separate videogames (the other, being The Fallen) as Trek merchandise not featuring a ship named "Enterprise" tends to not attract as many of the more casual fans of the franchise. On the other hand, given the drastic about face the Deep Space Nine series took at the beginning of the third season--one can almost view the producers musing:

And so it went for four long seasons. Dominion Wars parallels that fight, pitting an alliance of the Federation and Klingons (with the occasional appearance of the Romulans) against the Dominion and their allies. The Dominion is the ruling party of the Delta quadrant, a small group of shape-shifting beings who grow other species in vats to do their bidding--usually sending them out in great numbers for suicide missions. Not too subtle with the evil thing. Die slimy alien, die! The Cardassians, the species that previously enslaved Bajor, and the mysterious Breen are the Dominion's allies in the Alpha Quadrant, though Trek fanatics who choose the Dominion campaign (there is one for each side of the conflict) might have the advantage of not wasting valuable training on Cardassian commanders, knowing that they will eventually defect en masse.

"The Badlands" are a graphical showcase

Dominion Wars is at once the most beautiful games I have played in recent memory as well the most wretched. It manages to pull off nebulae and things I cannot even name to an aplomb that no other space game has ever aspired to. The cost of this, however, is a pointillist look that is hard to capture in screenshots due to compression. This lends an ethereal look to even solid objects at times and makes even the latest in graphics technology look like an old Riva 128 board trying to run Quake III. Look, mind you. The game is breathtakingly fluid, with high FPS throughout even the most frantic firefights--but part of this must be attributed to the locked and unchangeable resolution of 800x600 pixels. 2X FSAA proved to be a bit much for my setup, but it might just be possible given enough hardware (though multisampling boards would have a tremendous advantage over super-sampling) and would clean up many a rough edge, especially on Federation craft.

When entering "warp" ships contort to good effect

Of all the Star Trek naval games, Dominion Wars is easily the most cinematic. No other game gives the same sense of ships sweeping through space; though much of that has to do with players watching more than doing. It is more of a strategy game than a tactical one: the strategy consisting of being at the right place at the right time with the right army. While there are a myriad of different buttons and doodads that let players direct ships to flank, take evasive maneuvers, or orbit a structure while firing--though such things may look impressive, they always, under every circumstance, lead to the player hitting the enemy less and taking more damage themselves than if he or she had simply clicked on an enemy ship and made a beeline for it all guns blazing. Tactics are not cost efficient in Dominion Wars. Nor are they convenient as it is a difficult matter to group ships under the player's command and order them about in real time. Though the game speed is changeable, it is only available through a slider in the preferences menu which does not lend itself to on-the-fly adjustment.

Pre-mission setup

Missions are actually solved prior to actually commencing them, largely by balancing a fleet (many smaller craft vs. fewer larger) judging by the opposite of what you would logically do as a result of the mission's briefing, as well as by your successes in previous missions which nets you more money (or "command points" to be Trekkie-communist about it) as well as more experienced captains who usually tend to hit exactly what they order their tactical officers to shoot at.

The Defiant is in a world of hurt

By now, it should be apparent that Dominion Wars is by no means a good game. But if you are looking for a cheap space combat game or watched Deep Space Nine over the years, it is often a good enough game, at the right price. Shame they did not make a screensaver instead, though.

[Note: In Windows XP, Dominion Wars must be run in Windows 98 / ME compatibility mode, accessed by right clicking on the shortcut and selecting "properties"--else the mouse will fail to record user input]

by Richard Leader

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