Star Trek Judgment Rites was one of my very favorite games as a child. I found it to be a better game than 25th Anniversary with a little more variety in the missions, more characters, small graphical tweaks, and an overall story connects several of the missions. If you haven't played the 25th Anniversary, why not? But you really wouldn't be lost jumping in here. Each mission begins on the Enterprise bridge and the first thing to do is check the manual for the location of the star system (copy protection). Once there, you may or may not fight an enemy ship in a similar, but simpler, version of Wing Commander/X-Wing combat. The game's difficulty settings only affect starship combat with the easiest removing all but one battle. I sometimes flew to the wrong system just to see if I could survive the battle. Once the mission proper begins, you take control of the landing party with an interface somewhat akin to the SCUMM engine. Bringing up the interface pauses your point-and-click adventure to select the different actions, look, use, talk, etc. The puzzles aren't generally frustrating even though there are a few combine-everything-together-in-the-inventory-until-I-figure-out-what-I'm-supposed-to-do types. The cluebook gives more and more specific hints but admits you will not not get a perfect score by following it. Depending on your choices you will be given a score out of 100 at the end of each mission. There is always more than 1 solution, some better than others. Do you negotiate or go for your phaser? The choices aren't always obvious, but peaceful is best. Some trial and error is required and it is very possible to die or completely fail a mission if you aren't careful. It will happen several times in the first mission alone. When I first played this I had to get my dad to upgrade the hard drive because those 11 floppies were too much for our machine. I never played the voiced CD version but having the original actors speak the lines is a great addition.
