Star Trek™: Starfleet Academy

It's Star Trek meets Wing Commander 3, one of the best games of the FMV era. This remake of the SNES/32X game was the best Star Trek simulator of its day. While many missions involved combat, many more offered peaceful solutions. On top of the simulator itself is an entertaining interactive movie where you have to manage your simulator crew while uncovering a conspiracy in the academy and solving a mystery that will earn you the chance to take the real U.S.S. Enterprise out for a spin. While it's showing its age this is a classic game in every sense. Hopefully Chekov's Missions will be added in a future update but they didn't add much to begin with.

It's hard to belittle one of my favorite games has found a new life on modern PCs. It's the original Starfleet Academy in all it's glory. It doesn't have Chekov's Lost Missions addon, but all of the cinematics are here just as if you were playing the original CD edition, without having to swap out the CDs. The Commandant is still trying to teach those eager young cadets the ways of starship command and he still gets on my nerves to this day. Having said that, I do have a few things to say to anyone who hasn't played this before. (Please bear with me, I am not trying to downgrade this game at all!) This game was made in 1997 when 3D games were coming out to PCs in experimental force. The movies were done in front of a green screen or something and by today's standards, look pretty bad in spots. You can tell that the backgrounds are CGI. The starship & object graphics in game can be blurry from a distance, getting a littler sharper closer up, this isn't a new HD version. GOG left the game in tact. This is the classic Starfleet Academy game. The thing that surprises me the most was that on a Windows 8.1 system with a GeForce GTX465 graphics card, I just installed this game & it fired right up like new. I didn't have to change anything. The last time I tried my original game, the colors were horribly off, the game crashed continuously, but the GOG edition held up for over two straight hours of play without a single problem after installation. When a game that functioned in 1997 on an older desktop PC still works the same today as it did back then, providing the same classic entertainment years later without needing 3rd party support or patches, that's saying something! If you're a Star Trek fan looking for a starship simulator, I highly recommend this. If you had this game when it came out and the original doesn't work with your new PC, then GOG has come to the rescue! Any chance of GOG releasing Klingon Academy next?

This is my absolute favorite Star Trek game, I challenge anybody to graduate from the Academy as a Captain or Commander without cheating. This game does an excellent job of putting you in the shoes of a Starfleet cadet and earning your spot in Starfleet. Thanks for bringing this one back GOG!

When the game hit the stores it wasn't finished, so I remember that there was a general menu described in the booklet that didn't make it into the game. The blur also read the missions were built upon diplomacy rather than to seek and kill and destroy. Bollocks. I remember one mission where I managed to incapacitate an enemy ship and tow it back to headquarters, but the game refused to end. The only solution was to blow the enemy ship to smithereens, thus killing everybody inside. Weird interpretation of the word diplomacy, if you ask me. But all in all a nice game, with nice missions.