Star Trek - 25th Anniversary (Second Review)


Title		Star Trek - 25th Anniversary (Second Review)
Game Type	Adventure
Players		1
Publisher	Interplay
Compatibility	AGA only
HD Installable  Yes (required)
Submission	Neil Matthews

Review
Being a huge Star Trek fan (well, the original series anyway) I wanted to
buy this game as soon as I saw it, despite the dodgy review in Amiga
Format. It's one of the main reasons that I bought a hard drive all those
years ago.

Yes, this was one of the first Amiga games to come out which needed
something more than an unexpanded A500 to work. If only other games
developers had been so bold we would have had a lot more quality software
to play with, but that's ancient history now...

So what is it? ST 25th (as I shall call it) is a point-and-click adventure
in the original Star Trek universe. You control the Enterprise and several
of her crew, including Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scottie and several of the
obligatory nameless doomed cannon-fodder in red shirts. Most of the action
takes place on various planets, space-stations and other ships, with you
controlling the away team as they investigate a mystery or try to solve a
problem.

The look and feel is very Star Trek and totally spot-on. All the sounds
are right out of the TV series, and the dialogue between the characters is
just perfect - when one of the characters speaks it's just like in the
episodes, and just as funny. The missions (at least the ones I've reached
so far) are excellent; thought-provoking and difficult, but not impossible.

Bad points? You bet. This is a conversion from the PC, and on the
technical side it's difficult to see how they could have done it so badly.
The intro has the Enterprise flying past a planet while the theme tune
plays, and the animation is absolutley the worst I have ever seen. OK, you
only ever watch the intro once but quite how they managed to make a simple
animation so apalling on a machine that's renowned for its anim
capabilities is beyond me.

However, the worst bad point is reserved for the game itself; speed. It is
so agonisingly slow that you constantly feel like giving up. The main
thing is the mouse pointer - it just trawls around the screen with such a
terrible "lag" that it's difficult to click on the right thing. I can only
imagine that the programmers totally ignored the Amiga's mouse-handling
routines and wrote their own (bad) ones from scratch. This doesn't make
the game unplayable, but it does detract from its enjoyability.

There is one major saving grace though, and that's the starship combat. At
certain times in the game (including when you try to warp to the wrong
star system) you'll end up in combat with either the Klingons, the
Romulans or the space pirates (whose name I forget), and this is where the
game gets really cool. You have to raise your sheilds and arm your
weapons, and then you get to fly about (under mouse control) blasting off
phasers and photon torpedoes left, right and centre. Marvellous! The
animation of the bad guys is great (unlike the intro!), and you can even
see the eagles painted on the underside of the Romulan Warbirds.

Don't get me wrong, the main game isn't that bad, it's just annoying that
they have implemented it so badly. It was slow on my A1200 with an 020 and
6 meg RAM; it's equally slow on my A4000 with an 060 and 66 meg. The
actual adventure itself is very good; overall I'd give it 7 out of 10.




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