Star Trek: 25th Anniversary

The Good
When I was maybe ten years old, give or take a year or two, after saving up money from Christmas and my birthday, I convinced my dad to take me to Best Buy. Buying video games use to be much cooler than it is now; it use to be that you could walk into Best Buy or Toys R Us and see dozens of titles, even if it was just the covers. So looking around for something that I wanted to spend my money on, I happened to see this game called Star Trek 25th Anniversary on cd.

Well, since I already liked Star Trek, even at my young age, and since it featured the voices of the original cast, something my dad also found appealing, I decided to buy this game. And I played the heck out of it...

This is probably one of the few Star Trek games that developers manage to get right. Throughout the course of the game, you are primarily in control of Captain Kirk, either on foot or commanding the Starship Enterprise ("no bloody A, B..."). The game is divided into two segments: on foot away missions, and ship battles.

The game contains numerous "Episodes", that when played together actually hold a surprising well down story arc. On foot missions range from rescuing a derelict Starfleet vessel, being held on trial on the Klingon homeworld, meeting an ancient Aztec "god", and even an adventure involving Harry Mudd from the Original Series on television!

The ship battles are surprising well done also, and vary in difficulty. While in command as Kirk, you can order Uhuru to hail other ships, Spock to scan them, and even assign different divisions of the ship for Scotty to fix. Ship battles are not random, they only occur if you go to star systems you are not supposed to go to (Klingon, Romulan Neutral Zone, etc), but occasionally skirmishes happen during a routine mission.

The Bad
Speaking from nostalgia here, there was very little I didn't like about the game. It was probably the hardest game I played growing up, hard enough that I even wrote the company, Interplay, for a walkthrough. And amazingly, along with a note from somehow high in the corporation ( I want to say the president, but I can't recall) saying they were glad I enjoyed the game, they send me a hand typed walkthrough, as opposed to some cheap factory laminated thing.

So yeah, missions are hard if you are not use to Myst type games, and they are even harder if you want to achieve the best ranking on every mission.

And I never beat the game! The final battle is against an opponent every bit as cunning and as powerful as you are, and there are some conditions you need to uphold in order to beat them, and I could never quite do it.

The Bottom Line
This is one of those games that will probably be unfortunately lost to time. A classic to those who played it and remember it, it is one of those games that needs to be re-released for newer machines to be able to run it smoothly. But if you can find this game and have an older computer to run it, it is one of the best Star Trek games you will ever find, despite it's age. A true classic that, while never appearing on any Top 100 lists, always seems to get a nod or two by people.