The Captain

The Captain is a classic pixel-art point-and-click adventure game set in a Star Trek-like universe, which also features nail-biting turn-based ship-to-ship combat. Given the tiny development team, this game is a masterpiece! It has its flaws, but they are easily forgiven given how overall fun and well-designed the game is.

THE GOOD:

• I enjoyed the Star Trek style of a multi-cultural spacefaring civilization full of hope. The main character exemplifies this ideal nicely. Real world events are pretty grim nowadays, and it's nice to take part in a story with some hope for the future. Like the Doctor, the Captain doesn't even carry a weapon!
• The away missions are generally very well done. The scenarios are creative, interesting, and original! There are several missions I was able to replay and get an ending that I thought was ideal. It's really fun how at specific inflection points you can go in a different direction and get a completely different ending!
• The game is designed for (some) replayability, so you can try out different solutions to the problems presented. It is possible to skip missions if you're willing to take the same ending you've already achieved. You can also skip cut-scenes.
• The combat is turn-based strategy with no random element at all. It is very tense for most of the game, quite challenging, and fun!

THE BAD:

• The idea that an entire war can be won by one person or technological item is absurd. I think the writer could have tried harder to come up with a plot that, while it might have been less epic, would have been more believable.
• On the first away mission, I made a bad mistake that prompted me to unnecessarily reload from a previous save point. The game is actually designed to allow for different endings to each away mission, something that I don't think the developers communicated very well to me before the first mission. I found this quite frustrating at first.
• You can't save the game whenever you want, which leads to occasional times when you need to replay sections of the game for no good reason.
• You have a ship and crew, and yet you must handle away missions alone.
• Repeat after me game developers: it is not possible to transfer a person's mind (that away mission is pretty cool anyway)...
• As is pretty much true of all point-and-click adventure games, it's good to have a walkthrough handy to avoid unnecessary frustration. While most missions are pretty straightforward, it's not always possible to guess what the designer was thinking.
• When replaying the game, it is annoying that you cannot skip dialog or won battles! As a result, I recommend you do a non-violent playthrough your first time around, and do your serious run (including combat) on your second playthrough. Otherwise, you're going to have to do an awful lot of fighting twice...

THE UGLY:

• When viewing dialog and some cut-scenes, there is usually no visual indicator that you need to press a key to continue to the next frame.
• You can build a special item called a Suppressor Beam Disruptor. Using this item causes the game to freeze in the combat screen. This happened to me twice (during two different playthroughs), and both times I had to re-load and try again. It always worked on the second try, at least.