He said, 'the folks at Taldren.have tried to expand the promising Dynaverse II engine' but said 'the system still has many of the shortcomings that plagued Empires at War.' Butts noted, ' Orion Pirates isn't compatible with previous versions of Starfleet Command.' He said, 'it seems a lot like just an expansion at first glance, but it's really more of a stand-alone mission pack with a few new features added,' and that 'the real meat of this game is the tactical combat model.'

Butts said, 'Sadly, there is no z-axis in the game' and said it detracts from the realism. Twelve multiplayer missions and three bonus missions based on the 'A Piece of the Action' episode are included as well.' Butts said the interface for ship to ship action is 'well implemented enough' and 'everything is laid out reasonably well', but 'there are really far too many buttons on the interface for my tastes.' He called the AI 'robust' and said damage modeling in the game is 'excellent', but said some of the ship's voice acknowledgements are bland. Best of all there's a simple mission creator that lets you set up the engagements you'd like to see.

Steve Butts of IGN said, 'There are twelve new campaigns here along with 26 skirmish missions. The game received 'generally favorable reviews' according to the review aggregation website Metacritic.

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