I never got the chance to play Away Team when I was a kid, so I was excited to give it a shot in 2021. And... it's certainly an interesting game, I'll grant, but suffers a bit from an incredibly clunky UI (even by contemporary standards) and a bizarre premise contrary to the primary themes of (golden era) Star Trek. Away Team is a real-time tactical strategy game, and the core systems have a lot of potential to be engaging, and a fair amount of theoretical depth. Bonus objectives also provide some nice replay value, and optimizing your runs can be rewarding. The main issue holding the game back is the UI, which is profoundly clumsy (for example, you can only use the left mouse button to issue move commands, can only use the right mouse button for interaction commands) and largely bereft of visual feedback. The cursor, for example, rarely changes, meaning critical information is often obfuscated. This makes even simple tasks unnecessarily frustrating and tedious. The other, lesser, issue is the premise, which has you lead the away team of a Federation starship that seems to have been built specifically to invade sovereign nations and interfere in their conflicts. It's literally nothing but one flagrant, unnecessary prime directive violation after another. Obviously any Star Trek game oriented around violence is going to have this issue, but most of the other Star Trek games at least try to justify it, yeah? And Away Team fails to make even that token effort. All of which isn't to say that Away Team is a bad game... just that it probably doesn't have any appeal to non-Star Trek fans, and even for Trekkies it's probably best to go into it with low expectations.
