Star Trek: New Worlds

A ground-based 3D real-time strategy game set in the Star Trek universe may sound like a good idea, but Star Trek: New Worlds fails to deliver the goods.

A ground-based 3D real-time strategy game set in the Star Trek universe may sound like a good idea, but Star Trek: New Worlds fails to deliver anything that's really unique to this increasingly popular game genre.

In Star Trek: New Worlds, you take the role of the Klingons, Romulans, or Federation to colonize a series of planets, harvest resources (in this case Dilithium and other minerals), construct buildings and vehicles, and either defend against or destroy your enemies. This is pretty standard stuff for the genre and if you've played any RTS games before, you're probably already bored.

While New Worlds is set in the Star Trek universe (shortly after the events in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier), none of the characters from Star Trek make an appearance, and most of the buildings and vehicles are unfamiliar, having been created specifically for the game. If you removed the familiar Trek lingo, there wouldn't be much left to make it stand up against stronger titles like Ground Control or Dark Reign 2. It seems like the Star Trek license was slapped onto an existing game simply to drive sales.

This would be forgivable if New Worlds was a solid game to begin with, but it's not. The camera control is clunky and frustrating, the three different races share nearly identical structures and units, and the gameplay gets repetitive after the first few missions.

New Worlds does manage to get a few things right. Worker units automatically do their jobs without having to be given orders, which cuts down on micro-management and makes building and harvesting easier than in other RTS games. Another nice touch is the Tricorder feature, which allows you to give orders directly from a tactical map view. You can also assign senior staff from engineering, security, and other areas to buildings and vehicles to increase their productivity.

The 3D graphics are sometimes impressive, especially in the free-floating camera mode, but this mode adds little to the gameplay and is so frustrating to control that most players will probably ignore the feature, opting instead to play the game from the fixed top-down perspective. A rockin' soundtrack along with quality sound effects and voice acting add to the production value, but can't improve the gameplay.

Star Trek: New Worlds is by no means a bad game. Rather, it's a fairly standard 3D RTS game set somewhat awkwardly in the Star Trek universe. Trekkies might get a kick out of it, but anyone familiar with the RTS genre will probably be unimpressed.

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