Star Trek: New Worlds

In this review, I shall give you some insight into the odd, cluttered and often psychosis-laden mind of a game reviewer, and many of the decisions and obstacles encountered. To make it easier for those who just don't care, all information that isn't actual review content will be in italics. That way we can keep the hate-mail to a minimum.
-I've been reading a plethora of newspapers lately, and have found that their 'pyramid' method of information conveyance is quite effective at appealing to a majority of readers. With this approach, the broadest amount of information is given at the beginning, with subsequent paragraphs providing smaller and more detailed information as the article unfolds. My normal approach to reviews is more conversational in nature, whereby I imagine sitting across from someone moderately familiar with gaming in general and describing the game to them.

Star Trek: New Worlds is the first foray into planet-bound combat for the venerable space series, and sadly in keeping with the Star Trek game legacy, this title comes up lacking. From the poor pathfinding and combat AI, to the uninspired missions, it will require a very daring, patient and psychotically fanatic gamer with copious amounts of free time to taste the bittersweet meat of this fruit. Even then, the single positive thought running through that warp-coil altered dementia will be 'well, the music is really good.'
-see? you already know enough about the game to begin making a purchase decision.

-This next paragraph demands that I decide the direction of the review. Should I give a history of Star Trek games? Or do enough people know that this will be useless? Should I start with the bad or the good? Read on and see the mind of a game writer unfold. 
What's amazing to me is that I am still disappointed each time a Trek game falls short. By now, you would think anyone with experience with these titles and two brain cells that voluntarily communicated with each other would have been desensitized to a degree that even Samson with a full head of hair would have trouble raising their expectations. Perhaps Starfleet Command blew the curve and gave us too much hope for the future? Whatever the case, the fact is that ground-based real-time strategy is a new direction for the license, and had much potential to tap.
-I went with the history path because it leads nicely into a description of the game. I don't particularly enjoy this method, since I feel that story is only truly important in games that focus on it, but this time it felt premature to jump right into the flaws.

Unfortunately, somewhere between the tapping and fermenting process, the vats were contaminated. The game starts out interestingly enough; the Romulans are testing a new weapon in the Neutral Zone, which causes a rift in space-time that transposes an existing star system from its galaxy into ours. Why the Romulans would choose to test weaponry in an area of space they neither have claim to nor permission to develop a deadly threat in isn't addressed. Well, many things aren't addressed. Like the original orbits of the planet that should now be decaying, and how the appearance of large stellar masses would significantly alter the gravitational pressures of the surrounding area, but the important factor here is that the new worlds are rich in Dilithium, which everyone in our galaxy needs, and are willing to break many rules to obtain.

And this is the justification for the terra focus. Not only does mining dilithium require that one be on the ground, but the new worlds are populated with races that it may be beneficial to befriend.

From here, you get to choose which race you wish to play the game as, keeping in mind that each one also has an inherent difficulty level.

The Klingons are the easy setting, since their focus is primarily conquest. (New Worlds is set right after Star Trek 5 -the worst one ever- and their major resource supply on the moon of Praxis is running out.) They have some powerful offensive capabilities and the hand-tying nature of politics concerns them little.

Romulans are the most difficult mainly due to the stealthy approach they employ and the fact that they are attempting to lay sole claim to these new worlds.

The Federation falls somewhere in the middle, though you would think their campaign would be the hardest since their objective is exploration and the maintaining of peace. Go figure.
-this is a tricky transition. Should I follow the flow of the game itself and describe the missions and how they are presented? That isn't vital information, but it will help segue into the initial problems I encountered well. Or begin describing the flaws, since that will help keep the review shorter and hopefully maintain the interest of the reader. Here's a tip: as soon as a phrase like 'this is where the game begins to...' or 'and here's where everything...' you know that the tone of the review has changed, the description is over and the praise (or condemnation) begins.

Once you have decided which race/difficulty suits you, the first briefing starts. These are in two parts. First, a view of a star map, followed by any number of in-game scenes showing specifics of the map you will be on. The whole time a representative of your race is rattling off objective, history and political climate information. This is where the game (-ahah!) begins to demonstrate its strong and weak points.

The good part is that the voice-over is done well. Not too much emotion, nor is it monotone. This is a recurring theme, as the audio in the game is amazing. However, the rotating star map looks like it was made with the original intention of porting the game to the SNES. Poor colors, and the map is obviously just a textured cylinder (badly textured at that) with some artifacts hovering inside. The initial glimpse of the landscape isn't too bad, until you discover that the color schemes used are limited and pervasive. They try to pass off the lack of variety with the reasoning that the rare spectrum deviations on the ground represent large mineral deposits. Don't believe it. In fact, mining is restricted first and foremost by the surface textures, so you often can't place a mine anywhere near a colorful piece of ground. More than once, my base was squatting like a crazed California gold miner on top of giant mineral deposits that I couldn't touch, regardless of the lovely hues present, which was far more frustrating than it sounds.
-this is a lovely opening for me to begin my recitation of the game's flaws. I obviously have decided that I wish to present the bad first (even though I touched on the good, it was a passing comment due to the fact that the style I'm using follows the actual game play), and finish the review with a small bandaging of the wound by listing the positives. Not a pleasant choice to make, since it presents the game from its worst perspective, making a bad impression that can't be erased, but since I'm here to tell you if you should buy the game, not make friends, I felt that was the way to go.

From there, the game (-there's that line again) just slides inexorably downhill. You soon discover that these 'separate races' are mostly just altered textures since the unit and building functions have little, if any, variation between faction. Unfortunately the descent into sub-par mediocrity isn't finished. Like the proverbial juggernaut, the deadly ineptness of the central game gathers speed exponentially as problems are exposed, until it slams into the very core of your being with megaton force. Leaving you, at the very least, a Trek fan with shattered hopes that anyone alive is able to convey, in an interactive medium, the magic of Roddenberry's vision, and at best, a real time strategy (RTS) enthusiast wondering at exactly what point the game ended and tedium began.
-all right, there was a little poetic license taken there, but it just felt...right. Essentially, I was making clear before we really get started, just how badly I was disappointed with this game. Hopefully my point was made.

The first and most glaring fault is the save feature. More specifically, the complete, vacuous lack of one. Yes, your progress through the game is retained so that completing a mission will forever allow you to play the subsequent one (or replay previous missions). But let's imagine that you're forty minutes into a difficult round, and are just about to send forth your troops for the final, genocidal assault. As your final requisite unit rolls off the assembly line, you hear a loud, for lack of a better word (and because the Batman series has made alphabetic representations of impact noises possible), WHOOMPF, and feel a small concussive movement of air. These events are accompanied by a screeching reminiscent of that emanated by the Sabnack issuing from the kitchen. (Sabnack is a demon of hell that causes mortals' bodies to decay. I have yet to encounter this creature, but I would imagine that when agitated, he makes some unpleasant noises.) As you decide to investigate, you see your tabby (or poodle, terrier, bull mastiff...whatever applies) come tearing out of the kitchen awash in flame and igniting the bulk of your non baby-safe possessions in its wake.

You are now faced with a dilemma. Should you pause the game, and come back to it later, praying that your screen-saver is functioning and thus preventing the CRT from burning a permanent image of your Romulan fortifications into the phosphors on the glass during the likely prolonged absence of your person, or save the game and restart later? Well, I tried to save the game, and in the ensuing search for said function, lost most of my vinyl KISS collection only to discover that there is no mid-game save feature. (Actually I'm kidding. I never bought KISS albums; they're all on CD.)
-this whole sequence is an exaggeration (no, really?) of an event I actually endured. The description of the gameplay occurs three paragraphs from here, when I 'illustrate my point'. I had been playing the game for three hours straight, and imbibing excessive amounts of fluid, and had reached the end of the bonus Klingon mission mentioned later in the review. Suddenly, I realized that I had raised the 98% of water in my body considerably higher than I was capable of maintaining, and knew that a trip to the 'water closet' was in order. I wanted to just finish the blasted mission, but knew that the time required by my units to cross the needed distance was too much for my biology to bear. I didn't want to pause and have to sit through it later, and it seemed a perfect opportunity to demonstrate clearly that I could accomplish many other things whilst my forces made their ponderous journey to the enemy. However, I also knew that my units would get spanked soundly if I wasn't present to control them individually, (which I later found to help me not at all) and the chance of losing this scenario and starting again simply for a WC break was an unacceptable risk. My dilemma was so ridiculous that I knew I had to take it up a notch and put it in the review.

Needless to say, this is a severe problem with the game. Causing my cat to spontaneously combust is enough, but not allowing me to save? That's a punishable offense in certain municipalities. Some of the missions can take over an hour, and that leaves you little choice but to set aside large portions of your day to play this game to completion. Of course most of the reason this game takes so long is unit movement. You have various tanks and hovercraft at your disposal, but getting them from your base to the enemy encampment is similar to uncoding the human genome. You know it will eventually happen, but you may not be alive to see it.

This snail-like pace is the least of your worries, however, since your forces travel in a single-file formation at all times. Additionally, your units crawl mincingly along at various degrees of slothfulness, so you will often find your weaker units far in advance of your main contingent, which forces you to periodically set different destinations to assure that your assault begins all at once. Otherwise, your lightly armored attackers will get wiped out long before they can provide a distraction for your heavy artillery.

Allow me to illustrate my point. I attacked a Romulan base whose only entrance was a narrow pass with a bridge above it. I had sent in a scout to determine the largest pockets of resistance, and discovered that the Romulans had set up a crossfire with some disruptor and photon turrets. Unfortunately, no matter what I tried, I couldn't get my forces to alter their approach, since the crevasse only allowed two vehicles to enter side-by-side. Once through, things got worse. As my vanguard encountered resistance, they stopped moving and began to return fire, thus preventing any other units from exiting the pass and assisting. The turrets were heavily shielded, so needless to say, I got slaughtered one by one.

This would have been frustrating enough, but the fact that it took me nearly five minutes to get my units across the map to begin the attack, the aggravation had reached homicidal proportions. If my cat hadn't been at the vet's overnight, I would have kicked her. Repeatedly.

Going back a step, I'd like to discuss getting a base far enough along to partake in such a mass engagement. After about the second time playing, you start to realize that the only reason most of the structures you build are in the game is simply to provide one more hurdle in the sprint to reach a desirable level of military power.

You see, you start with a colony hub, and have to build a construction yard to allow further development. Okay so far. Then you build a resource processor to enable a mine, which is your only source of construction materials. However, to make the resource processor effective, it must be upgraded, which isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but most of the structures require these upgrades to allow development of more and more advanced structures and units.

The problem is, there is no immediate or obvious penalty for these upgrades. You don't see a significant loss of materials, or any other reason not to upgrade, so going for that 'advanced' hub, means nothing more than clicking on a little yellow arrow and waiting a few seconds before you're allowed to build another structure. Essentially, you are creating many of these buildings simply to create more buildings. It plays out much like the reasoning for getting a degree in advanced theoretical mathematics. There is no practical application other than to teach it to other people. A self-fulfilling redundancy you might say.

I'm not implying that there is no purpose to these structures. Some let you increase the number of units you can build, others allow you to build more advanced weaponry, and still more permit faster production of resources. The point is, that you don't really notice these changes, and are left with the impression that you are building just for the sake of building. Since the overall focus of each mission tends to be your interaction with the environment (whether it be attacking your enemies, saving a colony or investigating scientific anomalies), it would have been more rewarding to have each structure you build enable a specific unit.
-one more item that I didn't put in the review, but feel is interesting enough to warrant an 'aside', is the poster Interplay gives you for the technology tree. I like these things very much, and generally find them very useful. Not this time. The poster uses game-engine renders of the buildings, with wireframe representations of their upgrades in very small (we're talking half-inch) pictures. The only way to tell what is needed to build a unit is to squint very hard and try to determine exactly what portions of the required building's wireframe have been filled in. Absolutely ludicrous. Even more insulting is that they make no mention in the game itself what authorizing a particular upgrade will allow. I played the game three times before I figured out how to build a disruptor turret.

And as for the units, there simply aren't enough. You are capable of exploring the entire technology tree in the first mission, and by the third, you simply don't pay attention to anything other than the turrets, shield generators and the three useful offensive mobile units. The cloaking abilities of Romulan and Klingon tanks are nearly useless since they have to drop the cloak to fire, and anything they would want to fire on is almost always squarely in the middle of a group of turrets that annihilate your forces in seconds. Sure, the cloaking limits the amount of battles they engage in on the way to their objective, but if you pass a group of hostile tanks, you can bet they're on the way to your base, and leaving them to the colony defenses is often suicidal due to the poor threat recognition AI.
- I now feel that I've covered the bulk of the 'bad stuff', and need to get on to the plus side of things. I haven't left myself with an easy transition, so I went with an old stand-by; tell the reader I'm making a transition...

So I've spent quite a bit of time focusing on the shortcomings, so now let's take a moment to give credit where credit is due.

I loved the audio. Just about everything that had to do with sound was exceptional. The music was always fitting and made a pleasant backdrop for all your activities. (Much like Starfleet Command, which is where I fell in love with Star Trek again.) The sounds of your base were nice, though I occasionally wished there were more noises occurring. Perhaps have the refining plants whirring gently, and the various custodial craft making beeps or some such. On the other hand, I've always believed that you've done your job well if you leave people wanting a little more, so perhaps that much noise would have gotten tiring.
-this same theory could apply to the fact that the entire game leaves you wanting, but I think there's a line to be drawn between 'entire game' and 'unexplored feature'.

I also loved watching the smaller details. These are things like the worker bees picking up raw materials and transporting them to from a mine to a base. Or the construction bees creating a building one texture-mapped polygon at a time. The best though, was zooming in to watch a raiding party leave an armored transport and take over a hostile building.

That's just about it. If you take a look, it took me all of two paragraphs to convey what I enjoyed, and roughly 1,200 words spent on the 'bad' stuff. While that should speak for itself, I, of course, won't let it.

Now, before I do a wrap-up, there's one thing that hasn't been mentioned. The bonus CD that Interplay makes available only by purchasing the game through their website. They tried this with Starfleet Command (SC), much to the chagrin of many gamers. With the SC bonus CD, most of us missed out on three epic battles no Trek fan should be without, including the encounter with Kahn from the second original series film. (-I've butted heads with many people, some at Interplay, about this 'bonus CD' marketing. While I understand that it's a technique to encourage direct purchase, it ultimately punishes the user who fears buying things over the web. I have been drawing attention to this where possible in the hopes that Interplay will decide to ease the policy and at least provide a post-purchase mail-in option. No luck so far.) This time, however, they have included a lot of production imagery, a collection of 'webisodes' and three missions, one for each race. The extra missions were unimpressive, though one bears mention, if only for its infamy. In the Klingon mission, your base is being strafed by a Romulan Bird of Prey, and here's the best part: the AI is so rudimentary that the mission briefing even tells you that the Romulans are using a repetitious attack pattern, and this is the key to your victory. They actually tell you that the AI sucks, and encourage you to exploit it! I'm one step closer to seeing it all.

As for the production imagery, I was unable to locate any of this. In fact, I couldn't find anything on the disc other than the missions. I had already seen the webisodes since (as I'm sure you can infer) they are available over the web. These are essentially a continuation of the story within the game through the cut-scene movies, and aren't terribly important, but a nice perk for fans.
-as a very interesting note, once I had loaded the bonus CD, I saw that it created another folder of new worlds with many similar files. As an experiment, I completely erased my save files and combined the two. I was hoping this might help me find the missing content, but instead I lost the three bonus missions and it unlocked all the main game missions.

So should you buy this game? No. Not even if you're a fan would I suggest this game. The repetitious battles and limited tech tree will leave RTS gamers wanting, and the story is contrived at best, so Trek fans will be disappointed. The potential is there, but given the quality of this title, I doubt there will be sufficient interest to warrant a sequel.

Gameplay: 4. Has the basics down, but is ultimately unrewarding. The unit control is rudimentary, the available selection sadly limited and the base-building, repetitious. It is easy to understand what you're doing though, and the mission objectives usually clear enough to remove doubt. 

Graphics: 6. Pretty straightforward engine. Isn't really unpleasant (other than lack of variety), but it doesn't impress. Middle-of-the-road applies here.

Sound: 9. Almost makes you want to cry when you think how great this game would have been if the gameplay had equaled the sound. Orchestral score perfectly matches what you're doing, and the voice-overs are effective. 

Difficulty: 7. The only reason this even registers on the difficulty scale is the amount of patience it requires of you. In the day and age of instant gratification, that's a tall order. The difficulty lays not so much in the skill, as in the ability to overwhelm your opponents before they do so to you.

Concept: 8. Really had potential. New ground for Star Trek (pun intended) that could have challenged Starcraft just on fanbase alone. (Challenged, Blizzard boys, I just said challenged.) 

Overall: 4. You coulda been somebody! Yet another in the long list of unsuccessful Star Trek games. Here's to Starfleet Command 2...