Star Trek: New Worlds Review

Star Trek: New Worlds is the third Star Trek-licensed game from Interplay's 14 Degrees East division, but after you spend several mind-numbing hours with it, you'll think it's the first game the developers have ever undertaken. The laundry list of flaws in New Worlds is long and assorted, but there's one significant problem that should be mentioned right off the bat. The only connections this boring real-time strategy game has with Star Trek are the logo on the box, the names of the races, and the types of weapons that your units use. You could easily get the impression that New Worlds started out as any old 3D strategy game and that Interplay later decided to stick it with a Star Trek license. And although that's not actually the case, the fact remains that once you get into the incredibly tedious missions, you might well forget that the action's taking place in the Star Trek universe.

Since just about any astronomical phenomenon can occur in the world of Star Trek, the game's story is perfectly acceptable: A Romulan weapons experiment causes entire star systems to appear out of thin air, and of course they're just loaded with dilithium and other goodies that the big three - the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans - want to lay their hands on. As an officer of one of those factions, you're assigned a series of missions that require you to build full-blown colonies capable of building vehicles and structures. To do that you'll need resources like dilithium and lesser-known commodities like magnesite ore and kelbonite. You've also got to build power generators to run your base, construct housing to accommodate more colonists and crew, and... you get the picture. It's typical real-time strategy, but unfortunately 14 Degrees East decided to ignore nearly every advance that's been made in the genre over the last several years.

As in other 3D real-time strategy games, Star Trek: New Worlds portrays 3D terrain and objects from an isometric perspective that can be panned and zoomed. While the lighting effects are sometimes impressive, the buildings and vehicles are merely adequate, and it isn't easy to distinguish the units from one another. In fact, it's nearly impossible to visually identify a unit when the view is zoomed out enough to get a good command perspective, so you wind up either clicking on it to hear its signature response or zooming in for a close-up look. The advantage of zooming in is that you can actually scroll the main display at a reasonable speed; the disadvantage is that you no longer can tell what's going on or even get a good sense of where you are.

But that's something you can live with. What might be more frustrating is that none of the keyboard commands can be reconfigured, so you must keep your left hand perched on the left-hand side of the keyboard to move the camera, no matter what. There's an option to double-right-click on the strategic map to jump quickly to a new area, but amazingly it doesn't work if your cursor is resting over a unit or building.

The lack of formations and the inability to set waypoints makes unit control even more problematic, and what tops it all off is that the game plays incredibly slowly. Send some tanks to a distant point on the map, and you'll have time to go make a sandwich and eat half of it before they get there. There's no option to adjust the game speed, just like there's no option to pause the game to reevaluate the situation when things get busier later in a mission: Pausing freezes the entire game, including the mouse cursor.

There are even more problems with the interface design in New Worlds. Each building is assigned a coordinate, and over the course of the game, you'll be informed - for example - that a particular mining station has exhausted its resources. But if you click on a mining station, its coordinates aren't actually displayed! Instead, you must gingerly move the mouse near the building, rather than directly over it, and use those coordinates to deduce whether the building you're about to tear down is the one that's no longer productive.