Star Trek™: Starfleet Academy

GOG is supposed to be the saviour of retro PC games. They do all of the work, so you don't have to! The last few retro games I've bought from GOG have proved to be the opposite experience, however. I bought Starfleet Academy on a whim, having enjoyed it as a child and been reminded of it today. They took my money and let me download the files, but it refused to start, and now the 'play' button is greyed out. I *literally only buy from GOG because they're supposed to make old games playable on modern machines easily*, but lately none of them have been. I own the original discs for this game. If I wanted to mess around trying to find fixes to get it running, I'd have just used those. I bought it from GOG because I expected it would 'just work'. Please, look into this. I'm no longer going to feel confident buying from GOG anymore after these experiences.

I absolutely loved this game when it came out!! I still have the original CD's. Now, I'm waiting for its sequel, Klingon Academy, to come out!! Great Job GOG!!

Wanted to enjoy this. Despite the quite dated FMW GFX and the clunky feel when first playing I persevered for a short while despite the ever mounting bugs. Most annoying initial one was painstakingly manually setting controls (game assumes you have keypad, i.e isn't laptop friendly.) it then resets them all if you accidentally click on 'controls' instead of 'keyboard' in menu. Collision detection is awful. Just awful. C64 esque. But things really unraveled come mission 3. Mid combat with 2 Birds of Prey the game just quit to the desktop, whilst still pseudo running the game. AND whilst flipping PC display to 'portrait.' Occasionally you can get the game to maximise again (by which point the ship is shafted and mission ruined), more often the game just puts the laptop in limbo - and even a restart leaves your machine in a bizarre flipped portrait desktop setting. I exercised massive patience trying to play further but after one particularly ridiculous battle (adding more power to phasers and photons led to the phasers going off line 5 seconds into battle.... adding more power to shields inexplicably led to them failing in seconds) I was close to getting somewhere, despite the game's insistence we all die, when once again the dreaded dead space appeared and I was forced to go into weird sideways task manager to quit the game. Doing this whilst your nagging, repetitive engineer audibly whines repeatedly 'we're all f**ked captain. We're travelling in a straight line blind. The life support is failing. Again.' was like being punched repeatedly in the face. I began to imagine the bridge crew suffocating but it didn't alleviate my fury at the inanity of this awful game. The greatest satisfaction from two nights of play was uninstalling it just now. A relief almost. At least the slimmed down fairly basic SNES version was fairly fun back in the day. (I even beat the Kobayashi Maru on that... although the game refused to acknowledge it and still says you've failed. :-) ) IN fairness, this Gog download might have been slightly, slightly more playable with a joystick but the overwhelming flaws would have still driven me away. Fly you fools.

Even the biggest Star Trek fan has to admit that this game is pretty much the worst the franchise has to offer. First of all, there are the terrible FMV sequences in which a crew of amateur actors tries to breathe life into the story of an amateur author. The very ugly ships steer like small fighters in the extremely dreary depiction of space. Even Wing Commander III looked better in comparison. Not to mention Prophecy. The missions are also not too difficult, so that the player never really has to make an effort. Conclusion: If you are looking for appealing space entertainment, you should rather look at I-War. Or at least Klingon Academy, which is clearly better in every respect. Starfleet Academy is therefore more for completists, but they will probably enjoy the big box version much more.

Great