Star Trek™: 25th Anniversary

Good: - missions 1,3,6,7 are star-trek like - you get to test yourself as kirk solving a (simplified) space mystery - writing is good and funny at places, without being obnoxious - voice acting done by TOS crew - really good - fair adventure for the most part (which wasn't that common at the time) - I don't recall reaching a state that I couldn't recover - references to plot in TOS Bad: - game breaks it's own rules when it comes to the "adventure" part (use action usually doesn't require selecting a crewmember and just works, except in a few places where it doesn't and it's not obvious what's wrong) - story lines are not missions 2,4,5 are not really start-trek - there's no mystery, just padding - some of the puzzles/required actions are unreasonable - guidebook is necessary - no way to access previous dialogue - if you miss something you need to a load previous save - no autosave between missions - you have to save before the end of previous mission or after the briefing of the next mission - no main menu - mission 4 - bad/no story, bad puzzles, buggy (character sleeps in one screen while being awake in another) Summary: only for star trek fans

This could have been a great adventure game, but sadly its various design flaws and bugs make it pretty frustrating. The biggest problem for me was that the puzzle objects were often difficult to notice/recognize: they were too small or lacked details (by the graphical standards of 1992, of course). For example, I clearly saw one big rock on the screen, but it turned out to be a pile of small rocks. Control panels aboard the spaceships were very generic looking, tiny and difficult to distinguish from each other... This is a shame because otherwise the visual style of the game was pretty nice. Also, it could be because I'm not a native English speaker, but I found the dialogue pretty unclear at times, and I frequently wondered what I was supposed to do - and why? I felt that most of the episodes lacked a clear main goal and were just collections of mini puzzles. And oh, the final mission of the game is still to be fixed (when Spock suggests to raise shields, do not do that or otherwise you may not be able to complete the mission).

Replaying 'Star Trek: 25th Anniversary' on the actual day of 'Star Trek''s 50th anniversary brought back many memories. I remember seeing the great looking graphics on screenshots, noticing how it looks different from the Sierra and LucasArts adventure games at the time, and coveting it after reading an article about it in Compute! Magazine. I eventually got a copy of the game a year or two later, but was not fortunate enough to enjoy the Enhanced CD-ROM version. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the game immensely. Thanks to GoG, I finally got the chance to play the Enhanced CD-ROM version, with great voice acting from the original cast. Hearing the spoken dialogue was particularly bittersweet considering the passing of DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, and Leonard Nimoy. For the most part, 'Star Trek: 25th Anniversary' withstood the test of time rather well. The adventure part of the game is still solid despite some cryptic puzzles. The space battle part, however, now feels more inferior than ever as it had bad controls and poor visual readings essential to success to begin with, as compared to its contemporary like 'Wing Commander'. It's unfortunate that the game lacks an option to skip battles -- and they are plenty -- because I just wanted to resume adventuring. To me, adventuring and exploring is what 'Star Trek' is mainly about. If I wanted to engage in space battles and dogfights, I would be playing 'Star Wars' and 'Wing Commander' instead. Still, 'Star Trek: 25th Anniversary' is a must-have and a must-play for adventure gamers, whether or not they are fans of 'Star Trek'. It reminds us of the more hopeful and optimistic times of the original series, and that future 'Star Trek' games should be more about adventures than action.

It's like being inside new episodes of Kirk-era Star Trek. You get the original cast doing voices, an unexpected visit from a great character, tropes from the show like Spock and McCoy arguing... It's just fun if you're a fan of the show. If you're not a big Trek fan, it's still a good adventure game with light space combat mixed in. The point&click adventuring is good and the puzzles offer enough challenge while mostly being reasonably intuitive to solve. The space combat is basic, but enjoyable for the most part. A pleasant surprise was there's some branching in the missions, allowing for some different solutions and paths. I never played this "back in the day", so I can say this still plays well today without nostalgia for the original Some negatives: - The UI is a tad clunky. Once you get used to it it's not bad at all, but you may need to read the manual a bit at first - The ending of the game hikes the difficult waaaaay up (or maybe I was just bad at it) but you won't miss much even if you don't beat it.

... but the starship combat is just unbearable. It takes ages to hit a ship and if it's Romulan or Klingon, it immediately cloaks and repairs. On the contrary, the Enterprises blows up after taking only one or two hits. I had full shields, full weapons and full throttle, I was fighting a mostly crippled Romulan shield. It one-shot me while my scanners showed it was defenseless, weaponless and engineless. It was my only enemy, so I wasn't scanning another ship. The point-and-click adventure parts, although, are really fun. Especially the verbal exchanges between Mr Spock and Bones, really faithful to the original series characters. This alone would be worth 5 stars. But the meaningless star combat system, with compulsory fights at the beginning of every single mission makes my mark down to 2 stars.