In battle, the most effective weapon is the laser. It's the same weapon for each ship. It not only imparts the same destructive capabilities, but it also triggers the same energy blast animation for each hit, along with the same sound effect. Technologies come in a variety of flavors. They are the Heroes equivalent of spells and include teleporting, cloaking, shield disrupting, morale boosters, and more esoteric elements such as duality and anti-quantum defense. Some of the these technologies can give you the upper hand in battle, such as the particle cannon which can dish out 20- damage to your opponent, and others such as the disruptors can block the use of enemy technologies.

There are certainly a lot of captains in this game. There are more than 100 of them, with various attributes that slightly affect the upgrading of technologies. These captains include humans and aliens which belong to a variety of classes including scientists, soldiers, doctors, pirates, spy, explorer, and headhunter. The captain commands a fleet of spaceships, deploying them in strategic positions for attack or defense. A huge problem arises when you attempt to check the stats on the opponent's ships. In just about every instance, the stats showing the relative strength and number of units was wrong. I just blamed it on the captain.

Exploiting resources for the manufacturing of more ships is as simple as finding an asteroid and mining it for materials. But there's an even easier way to raise capital for such expenses. Just sell your minerals for gold. Type in 0 for the amount that you want to sell, and you'll get 19 gold for your efforts. Cheating? This is Cheat Code Central last time I looked. It's up to the developers to fix that now.

Graphically, Spaceforce Captains is dated. Sure, it's a budget title, but the continued re-use of explosions animation and the space-as-a-backdrop painting do little freshen things up. The spaceships display some imaginative designs, but they look better as icons on the interface than in action. Space stations and other buildings look bland. Maps are not user-friendly and can be a task to figure out. The cutscenes are awful, with poor animation and passable voiceacting. It seems only the soundtrack possesses enough quality not to annoying me. So maybe that means that Spaceforce Captains should be heard and not seen. I should have just bought the CD instead.

By Cole Smith
CCC Senior Writer