Star Trek: Away Team Review

Star Trek games seem to keep popping up one after another. Look at it any way you want, but this isn't the most fortunate of circumstances as we both witnessed some great and some really awfull pc games there. The overall impression wasn't too bad though, as most of those games were published by renowned companies like Activision and Interplay, which actually managed to come up with a few quality titles (like Elite Force for example - Ed.). Star Trek: Away Team is a RTS game, which refreshes the Star Trek "serial", but is still far from actually bringing anything new to the gaming scene because of its similarity with Commandos, Desperados and even Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel...

The story is set in a time after the Dominion wars. Starfleet realized there are many things always working to unravel the fabric that is the United Federation of Planets and that employing a large number of star ships to crush the opposition could prudently solve this problem... This is why they formed the special Away Team composed of a group of highly trained professionals ready to face the most dangerous situations in the federation. This wouldn't be possible if the scientists hadn't worked hard and developed an interesting piece of hardware called the Phased-mass Holographic Masking System that enables the ships it has been fit onto to holographically imitate any other ship. Thanks to this device, U.S.S. Incursion managed to enter deep into the enemy territory and deploy the away team...

Deep in the hostile territory, our little group should pass through eighteen scenarios, performing sabotages and trying to remain unnoticed. In each mission, you only have to fulfill two conditions: complete all primary objectives and have no casualties. Most missions contain secondary objectives, which are not obligatory, but will provide your men with additional weaponry and gadgets. If you're not really into going through the entire game, you can simply bypass these secondary goals, as you won't actually need any too advanced weaponry, as Star Trek Away Team isn't a difficult game at all. Half of the game can be completed in no time, and it won't require you to think about your moves too much. Then, comes the tenth mission which is quite hard, and then you can rest again... This goes for the "normal" difficulty level, but if you find this too hard, you can always switch to the easy mode.

There are altogether seventeen members of the Away Team, but you won't be in command of all of them all the time; You'll get to lead two to six of them depending on the mission. In most cases you'll be able to choose whom you want take on the mission, and equip your team properly. The available equipment for each character will depend on his disciplines: Medical, Command, Security, Engineering and Science.

Now that we got the basics covered, let us get down to the gameplay... As I already said, Star Trek Away Team highly resembles Commandos... not only for the gameplay for that matter, the graphical engine looks exactly the same. Unfortunately, even though I think that a 2D engine like this presents a perfect solution for this real-time strategy sub-genre, it still causes some trouble when zooming in or out. It's not that bad, but it can sometimes give you a feeling that you're playing a game in 300x200, or even slow the game down.