The 8 Ball: Top 8 Star Trek Games

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Welcome all to another edition of the 8 Ball. I started re-watching TNG and DS9 over the past couple of weeks and it got me thinking about what are some of the good Star Trek games there are. The conclusion is, there aren’t a ton. There’s at least 30 Star Trek games, and only about 10 of them are worth a damn at all. I tried to pick what I think are the best ones there are, at least in my view. Let’s begin:

Just Missing The Cut
•Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Fallen
•Star Trek: Borg

#8: Super Star Trek (DOS)

I only have very vague memories of this game, playing it 20 years ago on an old 486. It was a game written in BASIC that was basically a Star Trek version of Battleship. The Enterprise (you) and the Klingons would move around on a grid board, trying to destroy one another. You could also explore around the grid, enter Starbases to refuel/rearm and so on. Don’t get me wrong, it’s extremely primitive by today’s standards, but considering when the game originally came out, 1974, it was pretty impressive.

#7: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Starship Bridge Simulator

I have to imagine that if this game came out on PC it would have been way, way better. Unfortunately, it was made for the SNES (and 32X) which limited the technical aspects of the game severely. While the ship action is pretty basic, mainly movie, speed, and phasers/torpedoes, the other aspect of the game was great. You actually had to go to classes and take quizzes/tests on the material covered. This affected your GPA and class rank in the game. If I remember right, you could also form friendships with people and they would be your crew in the simulator. I’d like to think if it had come to PC, they wouldn’t have letterboxed (for lack of a better word) the hell out of all the ship fighting scenes.

#6: Star Trek: The Next Generation – A Final Unity

Welcome to “Star Trek the Adventure Game”. I actually bought this game thinking it was a FMV game, but it’s closer to something like King’s Quest. They got all the voice actors from the show which helps with immersion/to tell the story. The ship battle stuff was a bit overly complicated but all the away mission stuff was almost classic old-school adventures games where you click to have your team move, and different members had different abilities. If you like old school point and click games, and Star Trek, it’s worth seeking out.

#5: Star Trek: The Next Generation: Future’s Past

A lot of Star Trek games have a ship combat simulator aspect and an away team/on foot aspect. Unlike with A Final Unity, the away team parts are a tad mediocre but the ship combat was great. It was basically an arcade-style shooter where you and the enemy ship could strafe around each other with your phasers firing and the torpedoes launching or reloading. The away team stuff wasn’t “bad” per se, but it was really awkward to actually command your team. The cool part was commanding La Forge or Data actually would change the vision. This came in quite nicely during dark missions where both Data/La Forge basically had a night vision mode. It was also fun just to sped around the sector damaging your own warp engines as you go as fast as possible.

#4: Star Trek Elite Force 2

Elite Force 2 is a technologically better game than Elite Force. The environments were larger, it looked way better, and you had dialog options which could affect missions. The big hurdles are the truncated cast (Picard, Reg and Tuvok), and that it wasn’t quite as focused as the first game. I don’t mean that it didn’t tell a story, but the first game had its focus on Voyager, and it was better for it.

#3: Star Trek Online

This is the story of “the little game that could”. When Star Trek Online went F2P about 2 years into its lifespan and I thought it was done. This was 3 years ago now and the game continues to soldier on and content is still being made. I have a friend who has dropped over 1,100 hours into it, which is pretty impressive to me. I tried the game, and found it during one of its transitional phases where menus didn’t quite work. It asked me to holster my weapon but the button it said would do it, didn’t actually do it. STO has gotten crazy since its initial launch with a metric ton of new missions and work put into it, and it is impressive that it is still going.

#2: Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force

Yeah, Elite Force 1 is on here, but how could it not be? It was a first person shooter set on Voyager. It had most of the cast (sans Seven of Nine who was patched in later), a ton of Borg running around, and was just some good old fashioned action. You went to Borg cubes and alien settings and pretty much killed everything in your path. Not exactly the vision Roddenberry had in mind. Still, it was nice to be able to just wander around Voyager’s decks and see the ship from that perspective in a game.

#1: Star Trek Bridge Commander

I should note here that Bridge Commander is a fine enough game, but it is number one when the Kobayashi Maru mod is installed. It adds dozens of new ships, systems, graphical effects, and a ton of other improvements to the core game. The game was strictly a ship simulator, having you make phaser arcs when you want to use them, or being in the proper positions to use your torpedoes. You could over power certain systems which would drain your warp core, and effect repairs on damaged systems. It is still the high point of the game series which is a bit sad when you realize it was released 13 years ago. Still, if you can track down a copy of the game, it is well worth playing.