"“A superb overall experience”"

Star Trek the Next Generation: A Final Unity.

This game was released in 1995 and was developed as well as published by Spectrum Holobyte. It is a superb game with quality presentation throughout. From the high quality cinematics to the graphics and the character dialogue, this game is immaculate.

Let's get on with it.

Gameplay: 8/10

This game has different modes of gameplay. The main type players will mostly be involved in is the away missions. These are a lot like point and click games with inventory management, simple puzzles, character/NPC interaction and plot development. These really shine with all the dialogue that was recorded for the game. There is also gameplay on the ship's bridge. The other main kind of gameplay is ship combat. The graphics at the time were very impressive and the degree of control you have over the ship was amazing. It was however pretty unimportant as you could delegate control to Mr.Worf and he'd usually steer you right. This is probably because the controls were rather complicated. It is always cool to watch though. The gameplay is fairly linear but you do have control in certain things. You can for example, decide to take your ship into romulan space and start a big explosive battle with a ton of ships. You'll get killed after a while but it can be real fun. Away missions do have deviating paths and there is more than one way to do a few things but it's not THAT flexible.

Audio: 10/10

This is one of those early games that really made use of the CD that the game was stored on. All sound effects, speech, music and background sounds are top notch and many of them feel like they're directly lifted from the show. The music changes as the story develops and the dialogue in the game is used to great depth so the player can explore many different game paths.

Graphics/Visual: 9/10

The graphics are bright, sharp colourful and make you feel like you're in the show. The backgrounds during away missions are vivid and imaginative, the ship battles graphics are 3 dimensional, bright and engaging. The full motion videos have different options such as making them fullscreen or smaller so they are sharper and changing the resolution. These videos are high quality and give you a feeling of immersion into the show when they use cutaways to the exterior of the ship during the captain's log for example.

Final Score: 9/10

This game is a visual and audio masterpiece with excellent and varied gameplay to match. If it wasn't a Star Trek game it'd probably be remembered much more fondly by many more people. I recommend anyone who likes Star Trek OR point and click/adventure games try to find this game and play it. It's a DOS only game but it is compatible with Dosbox with a fair amount of tweaking. But you may need a fairly powerful computer if you go that route. It is also possible to run it in DOS emulation mode in Windows ME. This also requires lots of tweaking.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 08/22/07