Deciding whether or not to like
Starfleet Command: Orion Pirates is simple. If you liked
SFC2, chances are good that you'll get a kick out of
Orion Pirates. Deciding whether or not it's a worthy
purchase is another challenge altogether. As the game is damned near identical, you have to decide whether the addition of the cartels and some skirmish missions is worth the price of the box. People who don't own
SFC2 have a much easier decision;
Orion Pirates is every bit of the game that
Starfleet Command II was, and more.
As in SFC2, you'll find yourself participating in either the single-player missions or a (working!) Dynaverse campaign. The latter was one of the shortcomings of the original release of SFC2, as the company who was supposed to host the servers got reorganized and couldn't do it. Orion Pirates supports the dynamic multiplayer right out of the box, however, which is good.
In the single-player campaign, you can pick to be any of the original races from SFC2--Federation, Klingon Empire, Lyran Commonwealth, and so on--or you can be one of the factions of the Orion pirates. The map now has two 'layers', if you will; the top one shows the various empires and their zones of influence, and the bottom one shows the cartels and their zones of influence. This sort of dual ebb-and-flow is intriguing, although you may just find it to be one more set of information to keep track of.
And Starfleet Command: Orion Pirates deals with tracking information a lot. The battles are never going to be faceoffs between twenty different ships; the sides are usually small in number. Controlling the ships means keeping track of their shield levels, where they have their power diverted, their direction of travel, and a host of other variables that are constantly shifting as the game progresses. Even though the computer does most of the micromanagement for you, there's still a lot of things to do, settings to tweak, and controls to fiddle with. This can be a frustrating experience, as the tutorial missions don't go into quite enough detail about just how to control the ships, and the instruction book may well make your eyes bleed with the 6-point font.
Because this is a 'stand-alone expansion pack', the original SFC2 ostensibly doesn't exist in this package. Realistically, all you're going to miss from the original title is the slightly stronger campaign for the empires; considering that the campaign is perhaps the weakest section of gameplay in both titles, that's not much of a loss.
Which brings me to the main problem with Orion Pirates--for all intents and purposes, it's the same game as Starfleet Command II. The new skirmish missions are cool, especially everyone's favourite Wrath of Khan reenactment, and Dynaverse II works--a big plus--but both the Dynaverse and the Campaign are still a little too abstract to really get into. Add the fact that the mission descriptions are sparse at best, which may throw you into battles you have no chance in, and you have to enjoy this sort of game to really like the title. It's a good title, don't get me wrong; the main flaw with SFC2, the lack of good multiplayer support, has been fixed--but the steep learning curve and sometimes too-abstract gameworld may turn off many gamers.
