Star Trek: The Rebel Universe
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Starfleet Command is attempting to contain a rapidly growing Federation mutiny in the Sagittarius Arm. Every Federation starship set to discover the nature of the problem has also mutinied and joined the Klingons. To avoid the mutiny spreading to the entire Federation, Starfleet plans to wrap the entire area in a Klein Sphere, sealing it off forever.
In a last attempt to find out what is happening, Starfleet sends in the Enterprise before the Sphere is set up. Its five year mission is to attempt to discover what is causing the defections, and hopefully stop them. If you fail in your mission, the Sphere will be made permanent, if you succeed the Sphere will be dropped, avoiding a potential war with the Romulans.
The game is basically a graphical adventure with some real-time combat and piloting. The game progresses by flying to planets, beaming down on them, and retrieving any items you find. There are several possible solutions to the game, with clues found along the way.
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Reviews
Critics
Average score: 84% (based on 11 ratings)
Players
Average score: 3.1 out of 5 (based on 17 ratings with 1 reviews)
Great idea, moderate execution
The Good
This is arguably the first graphical Star Trek game for computers, and it's a worthy effort.
The game is based around a mission to find out what is going on in the "mutiny sphere", where Federation ships keep rebelling and turning to the Klingons. Starfleet is going to seal off the entire area in five years, unless the Enterprise can figure out what's going on and stop it.
You control the Enterprise by clicking on icons for each of the bridge crew - Sulu for navigation, Chekov for weapons, etc. When you click on them their station appears in the main view, while whatever view was previously there moves to the icon's location. I thought this was a very clever use of the limited resolution available. The smaller icon displays were also updating based on the information that crewmember controlled, which allowed you to quickly understand the status of the entire game. Combat and navigation were controlled through the same views, on interactive 3D wireframe displays.
When the Enterprise navigated to a habitable planet, you could select an away team to beam down to the planet. Here the game changed to become basically a text adventure. The user was presented with the view of a room with an optional device in it, which would block the team's progress. Each crewmember would have a different suggestion on how to disable it, and selecting the right one would allow the team to continue onto the next room. Eventually this ended in either an empty room, or with a useful device that could be taken back to the ship. Selecting the wrong way to get past the obstacle could block it forever, or in some cases, injure the crew.
The game progressed by flying to new systems, combating any ships there and then landing on any habitable planets. This process would provide new objects that would open doors on other planets, or alternately a data bank that would give hints as to what was going on.
The Bad
Unless you're the sort of person that likes the "hunt and seek" of a classic adventure game, and I don't, Rebel wears thin pretty quickly. I would have preferred it if the game had a pure action solution that would allow you to play it more like an Enterprise simulator than an adventure game.
The game universe was also far too large. Without a guide to the locations of key parts, exploring the universe to find them would take practically forever. Later versions simply included a list, but that struck me as cheating. They should have simply reduced the number of star systems in the game.
The Bottom Line
Overall I liked this game, although I never played it to the end. For the retrogamers out there, this one is unique enough to suggest a look.
Atari ST · by Maury Markowitz (266) · 2009
Trivia
Awards
- Power Play
- 1987 - #3 Best Atari ST Game '87
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by Will D.
Commodore 64 added by Quapil. Atari ST added by Belboz.
Additional contributors: Patrick Bregger.
Game added March 28, 2000. Last modified August 31, 2023.