Federation Officer (2278-2350)

Description
Now, God only knows why this fell into my reviewing hands. I have literally no background knowledge of the Star Trek TV/movies except for a few TNG episodes which I found extremely entertaining when I was too lazy to switch off the TV after The Simpsons. Ahh, the good ol' days when BBC2 was a prime source of entertainment at 6pm...

Erm, sorry. My point is that I can't claim to know [i]jack[/i] about TOS aside from the names of the lead characters and the fact that William Shatner played Captain Kirk. Ask me the technical specifications of an Akira Class starship, and I can probably provide, but ask me the first thing about the TV series and it's like water flowing over a duck's head.

So, before starting this review I went out and did some research on exactly what a Federation officer's uniform looked like in TOS. What did I find?

Accuracy = full marks. The uniform has the right elements in the right place (except for the boots - those really needed redoing from scratch, the Imperial's boots aren't all that good). Now, the face has been reskinned excellently. It's not that it's been skinned into something different - it's still Galak's face - but rather than creating from new, Aurocastro has almost seamlessly reworked Galak's features to look like a typical generic Federation officer.

I did have gripes, mostly with the skinning technique used on the uniform. Firstly, the textures themselves are rather sub-par - you can tell what they're meant to look like, and they do resemble it, they just have little detail to the point of looking plain and cartoonish. More detail is needed, and it needs to look a bit more "realistic" in the graphical style presented by the Q3 engine, since as it is, it looks very much out-of-place in the game.

Also, as you can clearly see in the screenshots, some elements are badly placed. For instance, the band over the right arm. It looks too big, actually, but like I said, I don't have the background knowledge. I can say for certain though that it's placement makes the skin look dodgy during animations. The second component to suffer from this is the rank... pin... chest... thingy... communicator! There, got it eventually. The communicator does look [i]far[/i] too big compared to the screenshots I found, and again it's placement is dodgy - it's wrapped arounda quarter of his torso, rather than being just a small pin attached to the front of the shirt.

Still, for a first version, this is pretty good. It could use some improvement in the ways of skinning technique, but hey, it's not like it can't be reworked later. I'd say the author should release another version of this taking into account the slight errors.

Not one to miss if you're a Star Trek fan.

~ Kouen

[b]Bot Support:[/b] Yes
[b]NPC Support:[/b] Yes
[b]Team Colors:[/b] No
[b]Custom Sounds:[/b] No