The Good: - More races to choose from than the original, you can now play the Cardassians and Species 8472 which is pretty cool. - More ships to build and choose from than the original, the smaller shipyards now produce about I believe 8 ships, as opposed to 4 in the original. The larger shipyards produce around 5-6 ships as opposed to 2 in the original. - More special abilites especially with the ships that are added, I really like the Borg Tactical Cubes. - The warp speed effect can allow your ships to travel across the map much faster so this is helpful if you're impatitent with unit movement. The effect can be turned on and off. - The game generally seems better at handling larger groups of units, and path finding is moderately better but still not great. You can select up to 16?(maybe 20) ships now instead of only 8 for a fleet. The Bad: - The memory leak / crash bug from the first game is still here, it does take longer to happen but it's still there. So save your game often or else you'll lose it. - The graphics for the ships just don't seem as good as the first game, the ships seem less colorful and detailed to me, but maybe I'm wrong. - Thought the Borg were overpowered in the first game, well now they are even more so. What's worse than a Borg Cube that can easily assimilate your ships? A Borg Cube that also has the shields of a Sovereign class or Romulan Warbird. To summarize, they made it even easier for the Borg Cube to gain other races' technology. - Even more technology research, something I didn't find the most fun in the first game, so they added more..... So overall, it's not terrible, if you own and thoroughly enjoy the first game stick with that unless you are rather forgiving with changes.
I played the tar out of this game years ago on Windows 98 and it always was buggy. One of the biggest being a memory bug that would cause it to crash after a couple of hours usually. My suggestion to you if you play to play a long game or a complex one(or both), save... and save often, as that bug still exists to some level. One other thing that still annoys me is the tiny number of save game slots it still has. With all this said however, I play this game still for hours and hours, sometimes the same scenarios over and over again. I find it fun and sometimes frustrating but more fun than frustrating.
As the title of my review suggests, yes this game can be a lot of fun. The problem is the difficulty is kind of all over the place. One minute you could be holding your own against a pirate ship, the next minute, Mantis board your ship and steamroll the crew into dust, game over. If you like games that are brutal and unforgiving, you will love this game. Otherwise I would probably say go with something else. I will admit, it is a bit of a guilty pleasure to play it because sometimes you get a good run where most everything goes right and those run throughs are exciting. On the other hand, you can get a game where you die after one or two systems. So, beware. I did not encounter any technical issues per say once I set the settings I wanted.
