Star Trek™: 25th Anniversary

No, all those other reviews weren't lying. This game is a masterpiece. Star Trek: 25th Anniversary is an amazing point and click adventure game, pure and simple. Whether you're a fan of point and click adventure games, a fan of The Original Series or Trek in general, or just a fan of great games then I would recommend picking this up at your earliest possible convenience. Let's strip away the Star Trek elements for a moment and look at this in terms of raw game play. The puzzles are (mostly) intuitive minutes one or two more obtuse solutions. The interface is absolutely genius. It's by far the best interface system I've ever worked with in a point and click. It makes the interfaces of games like even the phenomenal King's Quest IV look amateurish by comparison. What else is there to say about point and click adventures? Raw gameplay comes down to the puzzles and the interface and this game has nailed both of those. Now let's look at the game with its Star Trek uniform on. The puzzles still remain intuitive even if you don't know anything about Star Trek. The graphics are above average for the time, the sound is ripped straight from the TV show, so if you loved or hated it there you'll feel the same here. It has all the original voice cast back, but the voice acting seems a little disinterested. The actors didn't put much feeling into the lines with the exception of Leonard Nimoy who gave his all for Spock, but Shatner and Kelley just read the lines in the most boring and bland way they possibly could. Just doing it for the paycheck is how it felt. The away missions (the actual point and click portions) are as I've described: Amazing. Great story lines that you could imagine full episodes for. The ship battles on the other hand feel like they were forced into the game with a crowbar. The space combat system is clunky and not well implemented, but it's unskippable unfortunately. That's this game's largest fault. I could say more but sadly I'm out of room. 9/10

To start, I want to say totally i agree with what Haravikk's review says ('Good, but Spoiled by its Ending') so do read that too. There's a lot to like about this game, as it gives us more original Trek and it's fun to take part in it. It also has the original Star Trek ethos. The actors are noticeably older in terms of their voices than their 60s characters, but it still works and great to have them doing it. All the original sound effects are used, but the music is fairly cheesy electronic music - not sure why because if they could have vocal track i can't see why they couldn't; have the music unless it was copyright thing... The things you have to do to solve puzzles are more logical than most games. But there's one that's to do with mixing chemicals that I couldn't get my head around at all. It does help that you get the Cluebook which is in the shape of a story that gives you the answers to puzzles in its narrative - a great idea which more of these game should use. The missions start short but get longer (With Feathered Serpent being my favourite) but as Harravik says, presumably because it was an added-on extended version of the original mission, the last episode, 'Vengeance' is very tricky to get right and despite being, as he says, what should be the best level in terms of drama and the setting it's spoilt by this. One other thing that started happening towards the end of the previous mission was that dialogue messages began being interrupted, annoying because there are ones where you're being told something important and in many cases those are the ones you can't make reappear. And because Vengeance isn't the version covered in the clue book it's not there either... I can't find them stored in a record log anywhere, which is annoying, not least as you're missing dialogue spoken by the original cast... This might read a bit negative, but overall i am very glad i got it and played it, and for the price, it will amuse any fan of the original Star Trek series who doesn't mind old graphics. Just be warned the last mission is difficult for all the wrong reasons...

Along with Judgement Rites, this was by far one of Interplay's finest hours. You get the CD-ROM edition which has the entire cast of the original series, reprising their roles, including some surprise guest stars! This is everything you could want out of a Star Trek game: Exciting ship-to-ship battles, exploring strange planets, solving puzzles, and trying to make sure the red shirts don't die!

For fans of the original ST series this was a great fun game, mainly because of the voice-overs with the original cast. There is good banter between Kirk/Spock/McCoy. If there was no voice (i.e. text only), then as a stand-alone adventure game or for gamers not really fans of ST, the game is fairly good. Most of the puzzles are fairly straight-forward and not too difficult, but there are couple of places where the (included) clue book came in handy (there are plenty of walkthroughs on the web as well). Puzzles are designed well in that there is no way to use an item that would prevent you from finishing the Episode (i.e. no dead ends). However, some actions can reduce your score, such as getting your redshirt killed (search the web on how to kill your redshirts for fun) or get the whole party killed requiring a reload (so you do need to save your game periodically). The puzzles are separated into “Episodes”, each one taking about an hour, and your performance is “scored” after each Episode and at the end as a whole. However, during the Episode there is no feedback (i.e. Score X/Y) on how you are doing. I’m knocking off 1 full star for the final ship battle. It’s way too difficult, even after web searches and You Tube videos explaining the fight. It took me at least 20 tries, and on my last attempt I got lucky by defeating the “main enemy” on the first pass. One of my hits must have disabled the engines because it just sat there in front of me. Bottom line: If you are a fan of the original series and single player adventure games, it is a must play. Playability was very stable for me on Windows 7 64-bit, and I modified my Dosbox settings via some information I found on web searches which worked well.

My brother had the floppy version for his 386, but it ran so poorly, I never got to play it. Finally, after 20+ years, I get to play this gem...and a gem it is. The controls are well thought out - I highly recommend you read the manual before attempting to play. The voice acting of the TOS cast is an awesome addition to this CD-ROM version. The graphics are obviously dated, but who cares. The episodic story lines follow the logic of the TOS episodes. This allows you to fully immerse yourself into the game. If you approach this as an upgrade to the pen and paper or text only games, you will have an awesome experience. Runs great on Windows 10 with no issues.