The first DS9 Game.

Set during the 3^rd season of DS9, this slow game makes you a Federation Ambassador, out to discover a murderer, and to engage your diplomacy with some dim-witted aliens.

The arcade-style shoot-em ups that crop up throughout the game are mundane, and laughable by today's standards.

Even the video cutscenes are pretty poor, with some in pretty good movie quality, and others that look like pixel blocks.

One good point is talking to Quark, who is delightful, as are the other crew members such as Odo. Unfortunately, Sisko is still a know-it-all hothead who annoys me no amount. Even Dax is a bland computer readout.

All the other fun crewmembers such as O'Brien and Garak have conveniently abandoned DS9 due to a plasma storm. This gives the added bonus of not having the game designers model the Defiant, or the rest of DS9. Except from a rather vague promenade, and Ops room.

All in all, if you like using the mouse a lot to move forward, turn right, turn right, move forward etc etc to get from one point of the station to another then this is the game for you.

Even the opening credits (shown in full) have the rather dull music, and not the jazzed up season 4 stuff.

Okay, Deep Space Nine is rather a slow, dragging show, but a game based in that world could have been cool. Someday one probably will be—but this isn’t it. Players take the role of an envoy whose shuttle hard-lands at DS9 after being attacked by rogue drones of unknown origin. Your stay at the station ultimately involves the murder of an ambassador; I won’t spoil the ending by giving away any major plot points. Harbinger is a very good-looking, terrific-sounding, high-gloss parade of missed opportunities. The method of navigation, like the one used in Buried in Time, is counter-intuitive. Your brain really starts to bend when you try perimeter navigation, which takes you not forward or backward but sort of around things. Never mind. To make matters worse, however, DS9 is not fully navigable, and with this level of graphic detail, you’ll instinctively want to go exploring. Of course, even if you could, there’s no map. Asking a computer for directions to an area and getting instead a rote, vague description of what that area is can give you a headache. The characters—just as emotionless as they are on TV—are computer-modelled bodies with textures mapped onto them, which you’d think would make them more realistic and human. Not so; with their bulbous heads, unblinking eyes and undersea movements, they actually seem surreal and sort of spooky.

Some pluses: this photorealistic game keeps you awake with some pretty tricky arcade sequences; you don’t have to wait long before somebody sticks a phaser in your hand; and time spent at Quark’s bar has certain rewardingly illicit undertones. As a logical extension of the show, Harbinger hits the nail on the head: it’s low-key, very pretty, and ultimately kind of boring.

Walkthrough

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