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.
Real rating is 3.5 stars. Never played the other games in this series, just tried this one on Gog as was looking for this type of game. Played a few of the Japanese scenarios and the entire US campaign (using the save game bug to get prestige, would be difficult without doing so). Although I did enjoy playing, by the end of the US campaign, it was growing a bit repetitive. It's a difficult game and each scenario takes 2-3 hours to complete, so it's a time investment. Especially getting to the end of campaigns and running out of prestige, needed to restart/reload from an earlier part of the campaign. There weren't many scenarios that are both land and sea conflict (you usually have sea units, but no real sea conflict), usually one or the other and mostly it's land/air conflict. You really only have 5 types of land units (infantry, tank, artillery, fighters, bombers), and the enemy has the same (with addition of fortifications), so gameplay gets a bit repetitive using these basic units, just different maps to play on. Interface is a bit clunky, and manual isn't very good. Upgrades are confusing. Some scenarios are buggy. In 1 US scenario, they give you a carrier to deploy, but no places to put it, and they also give you carrier-based planes. There seemed to be a good user-scenario involvement a while back (late 90's), with corrected unit libraries and fixed/new campaigns, but I never tried these. Never found a site that described exactly how to install these with newer OS. Stability on Win7 (64) was a bit of an issue. Game crashed on opening when installed with the Gog Galaxy client, so installed individually and got game to start. Had a few crashes, so tried Win 98 compatibility mode, and also disabled movement animations and all sound (didn't add much to game anyway), and it ran good after that (not exactly sure what worked, was just happy the crashes stopped).
Fairly decent game. I never played the LSL games back in the day, so I recently got this one on GOG to see what the series was about. I enjoyed it. Good voiceovers and animation. Good jokes (may get stale toward the end). Gameplay/puzzles weren't overly difficult, but I did need to consult some walkthroughs for hints a couple times. I liked the fact that you couldn't "die", or do anything to not allow you to finish (although there are a couple instances where you can miss out on dildo's and EE's), so you are never worried about having to save often (or at all). Worked great on W7 (64) with removing spaces from filepath as recommended (didn't try with spaces). And it doesn't (at least for me) need to be on your C drive as stated, if you have a SSD and 2nd std drive like I do. I put on my 2nd drive. I installed individually, not through the Gog galaxy client.
