This game is definitely intriguing. It very loosely follows the story of Star Trek Generations, with Soren trying to destroy stars in order to change the path of the mysterious energy ribbon called the Nexus. In this game, Soren needs to destroy multiple starts to get what he wants, and you need to stop him – you can even prevent him from destroying the Amargosa star.

Most of the game is played in a first person view. The controls definitely feel very dated, but are one of the things that makes the game interesting. The directional buttons move forward/backwards and turns while the mouse aims the cursor. On the bottom of the screen, you control your inventory, scanning and map. The big square in the middle will show you objects you can interact with when you get close to them, which is a really nice touch. On the top of the screen, your phaser will aim at that part of the screen. It’s very different to the first person controls we’re used to now.

In these levels you’ll shoot through enemies and solve puzzles. Sometimes, you’ll even beam down in disguise and can do a lot before you have to resort to shooting. The graphics are extremely charming and are surprisingly nice to look at. When you get hurt a lot, you’ll be beamed up and the mission will have failed – however, you can fail a few missions before you lose the game.

Between missions, you’ll use Stellar Cartography to scan planets and stars in order to work out where you next have to go. You’ll also sometimes encounter enemy ships and use a pretty poor interface to fight them with. All the good parts are in the missions.
The missions are quite interesting. One has you infiltrate a Romulan base as Troi, one involves Crusher investigating a living planet and fighting giant antibodies (it reminds me a bit of the Voyager episode “Macrocosm” and the Chodak from Future’s Past/Final Unity even pop up.


Eventually, you’ll reach Veridian III. As Geordi is never captured in this game, things play out differently. Picard ends up in the Nexus (which is just a flashing blank screen as he asks Kirk for help), then Kirk delays Soren and falls off a bridge. Soren then beams to the Enterprise and initiates a warp core overload. After separating the saucer, Picard beams to the stardrive section and stops Soren from destroying the saucer (although he does enough damage that it has to crash land) before finding an escape pod with a sleeping Spot and watching the stardrive section blow up in a very impressive cutscene that looks like it’s actually using the studio models.


Although that’s not the only ending – you can actually fully defeat Soren. He brings a large fleet with him to Veridian III, but if you manage to disable his ship, he’ll self-destruct. The Enterprise D warps off unscathed and Kirk will still be in the Nexus.

Quite an oddity. An adaptation of an unpopular movie three years too late that goes well beyond the average cash-in game, but ends up as what might charitably be described as 'an ambitious mess'. I played it briefly as a kid and it stuck in my mind long afterwards as this expansive, exciting, impossible-to-fully-grasp thing. Finally returned to it now and there is ... definitely ... a lot going on.

It sounds great on paper - a light strategy/space sim frame over a non-linear progression of immsim-y FPS levels starring the entire TNG cast and giving you the ability to alter the events of the movie by doing better or worse on individual missions. Mountains of Trek goodness in cute little details (Data being able to walk underwater, Troi being called upon to once again go undercover as a Romulan) goofy easter eggs (Picard bumping his head if you stand up in a Jeffries tube after bragging about his familiarity with the ship, a la Scotty in The Final Frontier) and fun non-standard mission outcomes and Game Overs (like blowing yourself out into space and needing to be emergency-transported back onto the Enterprise if you're dumb enough to open an airlock that you're standing in. (This can be literally the first thing you do.)). All the makings of a Trekkie's dream!

Sadly, the problems are manifold and quickly evident. For starters, the game looks ancient for '97. The FPS mode is somewhere behind DOOM in fidelity and the controls are impossibly clumsy, especially given allllllll the stuff you're asked to do, from platforming to stealth to item puzzles to pitched phaser battles. There isn't even mouselook! There is a lot of detail in the design (just look at the whole goddamn HALF of the screen taken up by the HUD) but it's far behind the times in every way.

Levels are huge and there's tons going on (including SHENMUE-level optional digging through drawers for pointless inventory items) but the mission design/objectives are so convoluted and the interface so unintuitive that it's a miracle if you can beat the first level without a guide. Oh, and the less said about the space combat, the better. It's somehow worse than the Game Boy games.

It's a shame that this, to put it mildly, didn't really come together. There are worse sins than a dev's reach exceeding their grasp, but this is pretty rough. It seems akin to how everyone desrcibes the first SYSTEM SHOCK - interesting but beyond clunky, and requiring a massive amount of patience to get any enjoyment out of. But I could be off base there, I haven't actually played that one (yet). Unfortunate that this didn't have a follow-up to get it right!

It's bigtime abandonware now, and almost impossible to get running on modern Windows, so if you want to give it a try, The Collection Chamber made a launcher for it that works great. But consider yourself warned, only the truest of heads need apply.