Star Trek: Away Team

Complex alien surroundings are the setting for your stealth missions, including Romulan outposts, Borg cubes, and unpredictable foreign landscapes. Select from 17 highly trained specialists to form the perfect squad for each mission.

Star Trek: Away Team brings Gene Roddenberry's famous creation to yet another game genre: tactical strategy. Tactical strategy is typically turn-based, only this one is in real time. Still, Away Team has a lot more in common with games like X-Com, Jagged Alliance, and Baldur's Gate than it does with StarCraft.

The concept casts you as commander of a Federation commando group. Using new technology, you and your crew are chartered to infiltrate galactic hot spots and efficiently handle problems. Your best tech toy is a ship that, thanks to an experimental holographic projector, can look like anything you want it to. This variable cloak lets your team move into position to beam down and take care of the problem with minimum fuss.

Commander Data (voiced by Brent Spiner of Star Trek: The Next Generation) doles out advice as you outfit your team and carry out diverse missions, such as hit and runs, rescues, sabotage, and raids, using all kinds of cool Federation tools and weaponry. Each team member has his or her own unique skills and equipment. For example, the group leader has grenades, the Russian engineer is the only one who can use a Romulan cloaking device, and your Vulcan security officer can mind meld with the enemy, giving you temporary control of him.

The strategy is solid and the game is brisk and attractive, although it is crippled with substandard artificial intelligence. Your troops aren't smart enough to return fire on their own, and you'll begin to wonder if the enemy has any battle plan at all. Missions are puzzlelike and repetition is necessary, often tediously so. And there is only a tiny fraction of the multiplayer options a game like this should have. Multiplayer is only available in cooperative mode and only then on linked computers at home. What? You don't have two or more computers linked at home? Sorry--there are no Internet options. --Bob Andrews

Pros:

• Interesting concept
• A few really good missions
• Decent graphics

Cons:

• Poor AI
• Sparse multiplayer

Star Trek: Away Team puts you in charge of an elite group of officers brought together to take care of the Federation's dirty laundry. Your Special Forces unit will consist of 22 characters, each with a unique expertise, such as medicine, engineering, science, security, and command. Before each of the 18 missions, you'll pick a team consisting of three to six officers, based on what type of skills you'll need in order to complete the mission. During the missions you'll view the game from a classic isometric perspective, and can move your squad in real time or pause the game to issue commands. Enemies include Borg, Klingons, Romulans, and rogue Federation members. Locations include Qu'nos, Romulus, Earth, and Vulcan. Equipment includes tricorders, phasers, hyposprays, and phaser rifles.