Bridge Command lets you live out your starship fantasies

In 2016, I dragged my Engadget colleagues to preview Star Trek: Bridge Crew, a VR title letting you live out your fantasies of sitting on the bridge of a starship. Sadly, despite having two fans in the team, we failed miserably at the game, a wound I’ve been nursing ever since. When Bridge Command, London’s latest attraction, asked me if I wanted to try out its real world equivalent, I leapt at the chance. After all, this wasn’t just me testing out a new sci-fi themed event, it was a shot at redemption.

Bridge Command sits in the space between an escape room, team-building exercise, live-action roleplay and immersive theater. It’s essentially a paid-for LARP taking place on a custom-built starship set which cost £3 million (around $4 million) to play space captain. In order to survive and succeed, each player must work with their team, communicate and solve problems on the fly for the better part of two hours.

ASIDE: There’s plenty of existing bridge simulator roleplaying games and a small, but vibrant community that supports it. Digital platforms like Thorium Nova, Artemis and EmptyEpsilon are all platforms that enable folks to gather around to play in teams. Bridge Command itself is built on top of EmptyEpsilon’s platform, albeit with some degree of customization on top.

Effort has been taken to ensure Bridge Command isn’t a one-and-done experience, and creator Parabolic Theatre hopes to build a base of recurring fans. There are two different “ships” players can crew, the smaller UCS Havock and the far larger UCS Takanami, which do two different jobs in the fleet. In terms of capacity, both vessels can take up to 14 players at a time but the ideal figure is around nine. There are four different mission types, too:

• Exploration: Involving discovery and adversity.

• Military: Space dogfighting.

• Intrigue: Espionage and more subtle action.

• Diplomacy: Making nice with alien races.

With two ships and four missions, you can play the game eight times and theoretically get a new experience every time. But creators Parabolic Theatre will look to develop the game’s running story over time, like a long-running D&D campaign. The game even tracks your performance as your career progresses, and can receive promotions after a particularly successful mission.

I dragged a Trek-loving friend along to one of the previews, which set us on a Military mission on the UCS Havock. We were tasked with escorting a resupply mission to a large warship on assignment, a rather mundane assignment. It’s not much of a spoiler to suggest our gang of plucky underdogs might wind up in over their heads on a far grander mission. Or that they’ll need to take the under-equipped ship to go toe-to-toe with the baddies and win out against impossible odds.

Both “ships” are fully-realized starship sets, which are probably better-assembled than what you’ll see on most sci-fi series. They’re designed to withstand the regular punishment that can only occur when crews of friends come to play spaceships. But once you’re onboard, you’re essentially in a self-contained environment for the duration of the mission. And it’s a pretty impressive piece of set design.

The vibe is distinctly Star Voyage (Not Infringing Any Copyright, Promise!), with the Havock laid out like the USS Defiant, but with the paint job from Red Dwarf’s first two seasons. A trio of terminals line each side wall, with the captain’s chair on a raised dais in the middle. There’s a helm console up front that’s pointed directly at the imposing viewscreen that dominates the room. There’s a ready room off to one side of the bridge and a toilet on the other, while the corridor behind the bridge is the ship’s engineering bay, bunkroom and brig.

Everything from the terminals and the set is linked up, so if a subsystem takes damage you’ll not just have it grayed out on your screen. Built-in dry ice machines will emit “smoke” when something goes wrong or you take a nasty hit from an enemy vessel. If the lights had flashed at the same time, I’d have been tempted to start jostling myself around in my seat to add to the immersion.

There were seven of us in the party, including some other journalists and some regular players who were coming for a regular session. Your humble narrator took the helm, figuring that I’d played enough Star Trek: Tactical Assault and Star Trek: Bridge Commander to be useful. We had an acting captain, and folks manning the radar, communications, engineering, laser and torpedo stations.

If you’ve ever used a touchscreen in your life then you won’t feel too unmoored from the role you’ve got to do here. Not to mention the first half hour of the game is little more than a tutorial to ensure that everyone is fluent with what they’ve got to do.

My helm station, for instance, offers you a picture of the ship with a 360-degree coordinate ring around it. There are two sliders, one for impulse power and one for warp, and a small square that lets you make some small evasive maneuvers. This is fine when the ocean-going liners you find in Star Trek are just heading from waypoint to waypoint, but pretty rubbish for combat. And I’m still annoyed you’re locked to a flat plain when space offers so much room for verticality.

Spoiler warning: The following three paragraphs outline my mission in greater detail.

The story begins while you’re putting on your military-issue space boilersuit, with a fictional newsreel playing in the background setting the scene. Once you’ve “transported” from the entrance to the space station, you’re then given a mission briefing and a send-off from the Earth president. Our mission, as outlined, was to escort a freighter on a resupply mission to a battle fleet which was dealing with pirates on the edge of the system.

A member of the Bridge Command team starts as our captain, giving us a tour of the ship and assigning roles for us to play. After we all get used to the basics in what might as well be called the tutorial stage, the captain then departs to help elsewhere. We’re then sent off to scout for incoming threats in nearby nebulas that, quelle surprise, are full of pirates. Naturally, the closer we get to the battle group, the harder the attacks we have to repel, forcing our chief engineer to race around repairing and repowering systems.

We limped to the battle group, repairing and re-armoring before we hatched a plan to play Possum to lure out the pirates. That plan worked spectacularly well, and with our hull integrity at just three percent, we were able to take out the pirates command and control vessel. After being congratulated by the top brass we were escorted back to the space station for a debrief and a drink in the bar.

End of Spoiler Warning: The following paragraphs do not contain any spoiler material.

It’s important to be aware of one’s own privilege and preferences when reviewing something like this. I found Bridge Command to be enormous fun, and if I lived in London, I suspect it would quickly become a hobby I indulged in with like-minded friends on a monthly basis. At £40 ($50) a session, the cost is a little steep but, even so, you could easily make this a long-running roleplaying game. And I’m sorely tempted to go a few more times when I can just to try and gain those promotions.

If there’s a downside (and it’s not even really a downside per-se), it’s that there are phases of play where you’re not doing anything. Or, at least, you’re a present and useful member of the team waiting for your colleagues to fulfill their parts of the mission. I found, given the need for clear oral communication and cooperation, that there were plenty of times where the best thing I could do to help my team was shut up and wait.

Given that focus on communication, I suspect it might be a turn-off if you’re a little shy or quiet of voice. The game doesn’t work unless everyone’s talking to share information between consoles and so it’s nearly-impossible to sit quietly in the corner. That’s not to say you need to bring any Big Theater Kid energy along, but I can imagine how this would feel like mandatory fun if you were dragged along by your friends or on a work team-building exercise. It’s a damn sight more fun and less painful than paintball, so maybe count your blessings there.

Bridge Command is located at St. George’s Wharf which is next to Vauxhall tube station in London. It is open for most of each day through to late evening, with ticket prices starting at £40 (around $50) at off-peak times for a single session.