Star Trek: New Worlds

The Good
ST: New Worlds is set after Star Trek V. A beautifully rendered introductory movie shows a Romulan weapon test going awry and sucking a new star system into striking distance of the Romulans, Klingons and Federation. Each group has their own motive for exploring/exploiting these new planets, thus setting up the first Star Trek real-time strategy game.

The Romulans, Klingons and Federation each have a fourteen mission campaign dealing with their expansion into the new worlds. In an interested touch, the game's difficulty system is tied into the three factions. Players looking for an easier gaming experience should choose the Klingons, the Federation campaign is the medium difficulty setting and the Romulan campaign is the hard one.

While each of the factions has different motives, the gaming experience is similar for each one. This is a real-time strategy game so your colony must be built up, five different resources must be mined and processed and a technology tree provides paths to different buildings and vehicles.

Personnel management also comes into play. People are needed to staff buildings and operate vehicles, so you'll need to provide food, housing and medical facilities to increase your population. Also senior staff members, such as the Doctor or Chief Engineer, can also be placed in different facilities to increase their efficiency.

The game is playable in an isometric mode, an overhead mode and in a first person camera mode. While the usefulness of these modes are questionable, it may be useful to observe the action from different perspectives. There is also an overhead tricorder mode, which shows where resources are located as well as your buildings and enemy buildings with sight of your units (conventionally, this plays as a radar-view).

The Bad
Sadly, there is little to recommend about this game. While no fog-of-war exists, you cannot "see" enemy structures until your units are upon them. Then, when your units lose the line of site, the structures fade away. Star Trek doesn't have satellites anymore? Also, no good reason is given for not having support from spacecraft. I think any mission could have easily been completed by the Enterprise and a landing team.

Mobygames does not have an AI rating for this game, probably because it is non-existent. If enemy units see your units, then they'll open fire. Enemy patrols might fly through your camp, but they never attack vital structures or run for cover or anything. Some missions require capturing enemy buildings, unfortunately your troops will still attack these structures and you cannot tell them otherwise. It becomes trying, attempting to keep your units close enough to support capturing vehicles without them destroying the building.

You have five resources to mine, but it is often difficult to place mining stations and then they resources need to be converted into usable goods. This feels more like chemistry than gaming. Also, the number of buildings and units is severely limited. From the first mission, it is possible to build everything.

What hampers New Worlds most is the lack of customization. You cannot remap the troublesome camera controls (which rely on the cursor keys) and you cannot adjust the speed of the game. This game plays out very slowly and your space-age hovercrafts literally crawl across the screen. It can take up to five minutes to get to where you want to go. On missions where you need to destroy all enemies, this is painful.

New Worlds also lacks waypoints, unit formations, the ability for all units to travel at the same speed, and easy unit grouping.

While there are three races presented, Klingons, Federation, and Romulans all have the same building types and units available, just under a different skin. There may be some balancing available, but not any I could tell.

Finally, New Worlds does not have in-mission saves. With slow moving units and units that might destroy buildings you need to capture, some missions can last for quite a while. I would not recommending playing New Worlds unless you had a few hours free.

The Bottom Line
I don't see why developers think that the use of a licensed trademark will get players to buy poorly designed games. I wouldn't recommend this game to Star Trek fans or fans of real-time strategy games. I would describe this game as Force Commander for Star Trek.

The Good
The only thing I liked about this game was the presentation. It’s a fairly original Trek story, and a nice variety in the planet types. The graphics are neat and tidy, with some great looking ships and lighting effects. But........

The Bad
....... It’s nothing compared to past titles like Starcraft. The max number of players in mulitplayer is three; gameplay can be confusing at times, and the 1st person camera angle is a waste. The big problem with this is that it’s just not Trek-ky enough. Sure, you have all the races there to play with, but an RTS Star Trek title is nothing compared to being on the bridge of the Enterprise.

The Bottom Line
It’s an original Trek title that fails to deliver. If you love RTS games, Starcraft is you’re best bet. If you’re a Trek fan, and have the power of a P3, take a stab at one of the Starfleet Command titles.

The Good
Interesting subject, as ground ops is a part of Star Trek seldom seen, 3 sides have different units and different tactics, not to mention the "natives", officers can gain experience and affect efficiency of various departments, decent backstory that actually manages to flow together a bit

The Bad
Too complex to be fun, as you can't build anything useful until you're half-way up the tech tree. Scouts and APC's are essentially unarmed, and it's not until the phaser shuttles (i.e. "tanks") and photon artillery units that you have offensive capabilities. Building powerplants and crew quarters is BORING, too many raw materials to juggle. There are three major raw materials, which are refined into 3 useful materials, which are then used to build things! As the ores can run out, you must have a high efficiency processing in order to get the most out of your mines, and that's micromanagement. Actual combat is mainly mob-attack, few tactics are involved except for stuff like indirect fire, cloaked raids, and so on. Units on ground move so slowly they don't feel like hovercrafts at all.

The Bottom Line
Star Trek: New Worlds is an RTS with a Star Trek MOD. The 3 sides have virtually identical units (unarmed fast scout, APC, "tank", artillery) except for one special unique unit. The structures are virtually identical on all three sides and all have identical tech trees. Most of the "growth" is in growing the "colony hub" to level 4 by building the pre-requisites so you can build combat units in addition to the defenses. Since you can't do any offense before then, the game then becomes who can click the fastest (and get the most building done!). As a result, the game has severe pacing problems.

To "mine" resources, you drop mines (and later, advanced mines) in the middle of a resource concentration. Then the building gets built. You will need some workbees to run between buildings, but that's almost automatic, you just need to make sure you have enough of them.

The game itself looks fine. Terrain features are nicely displayed, structures look nice, sky looks good, units bob and weave on their anti-gravs , etc. Even the minimap is actually useful in telling you where enemies can be seen as well as remaining minerals in the ground (tha tyou can mine). Even the sounds are quite appropriate. The problem is in gameplay.

The officer aspect of crew management can be completely ignored and wouldn't affect the game much. Assigning officers to certain specialties (like tactical officer to armory, science officer to research, and so on) is supposed to enhance productivity, but I've never really noticed any notable difference. Perhaps that's the problem of RTS... The different between 4 seconds vs. 5 seconds by feel alone is minimal, even though it's technically a 20% improvement.

All in all, Star Trek: New Worlds proves that complexity in an RTS game and the known franchise name does NOT guarantee good sales. The wrong pacing decisions in the game tech tree design along with added complexity does not make for a more interesting game.

The Good
Initially, the complexity of this game and the graphics drew my attention. From the very first mission, it's possible to upgrade your buildings and vehicles to a very high level. There are numerous resources to keep track of (five different types of minerals), and an in-depth technology tree, which was a nice change from other RTS games. The graphics are somewhat simplistic, but lighting effects and explosions are done very well. The optional mission objectives were also a nice touch.

The Bad
The game-breaker for me was when I tried to save my game during a mission - I couldn't. The missions can be quite long, and I simply don't have that many hours to spare. In addition, the ingame instructions are a bit misleading; studying the manual and tech tree is highly recommended before getting started. One more problem was the enemy AI - it appeared to be nonexistant. Enemy ships will fly past your base on occasion, shooting at various buildings. But once they do their first fly-by, they stop, arrange themselves into a nice group, and no longer defend themselves. Finally, while it initially seemed like an intriguing concept, I quickly grew tired of having to manipulate the camera angle. Luckily, it's possible to play from the tricorder tactical view (which really, is much more efficient anyway).

The Bottom Line
If you have a ton of time on your hands, and have the patience to sit through the lengthy missions, it might be a good distraction. Otherwise, the necessity to play a mission from start-to-finish in one sitting, and the need to constantly manipulate the camera angle to see what's happening, can be too frustrating.

The Good
The idea of the story, Star Trek based on the ground. What happens when new worlds are charted and plotted by the galant Enterprise crews ? Well now you can see it first hand.

The graphics are quite sensational and the camera angles and option are truly great. There is nothing like commanding the units from the locked overhead perspective and then changing to the first person view to 'join' in on the action. I wish they had this in Command n Conquer. What would have made the game even better would have been to been able to jump in the unit of your choice.

The scenery is quite nice, from lava cascading down hills, to pockets of gas erupting sporadically to trees, lakes and glaciers alike. AND YOU HAVE TO SEE THE CLOUDS ... they are nearly the best part of the game.

The Bad
The inability to save during the missions, and the lack of multiplay ... a patch fixing some small bugs would have been nice as well.

The Bottom Line
If you are looking for the latest and greatest RTS game, then you will be dissappointed. If you are looking for a ground based Star Trek game with an RTS feel, then you will be happily surprised.

In short, -if you are a Star Trek nut/fan then you will like this game. -if you are a die hard RTS purist you won't like this game.

The Good
The story was half good, if not a bit silly. Planets appearing out of nowhere because of some weapons test seems a bit far fetched to me, even for Star Trek. The disk can be used as a coaster or other fun toy.

The Bad
First, after I completed the first 3 missions, there was only about two military units!!! Things took a long time to move around. It also seems to ignore most Star Trek Technological advances. Like most RTS games, there is a "fog of war". But in Star Trek, it still has the fog of war!!! If you watch a Star Trek episode, they always scan planets and can magnify the planet on the viewscreen etc. But in this game, they've apparently never heard of satellites or scanners!! This wouldn't be so bad if resource collecting was simple. You have to build a mining station to get resources. The only difference is that you have to be in some kind of special map mode to see resources. The resources have ridiculous names so it's anyone's guess as to what they do. There also a bunch of them, all with a different color on the map. Back to "combat". You have an array of nearly 3 different units to choose from and you build "Phaser Tanks". Click them to go somewhere and wait. You will see that they will get "snagged" on cliffs and other terrain, if that makes sense. You can play as Federation, Klingon, or Romulan, but all units and buildings are the same except for voices and skins.

The Bottom Line
I can't really say much about this game. It has so little substance. . If you see it, set phasers to kill....