Folks, it’s time to go back to school. Space school.
This is just way too many titles for one title, though – they should really get rid of at least one of the parts of this title. ST:SA-SBS doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, either.
In any case, ST:SA-SBS is a game designed to train you for a potential career in being part of the bridge crew of a Federation starship (hey, it could happen). It does this in a few different ways – first are the expected things, such as training missions. Then there are the other parts, like, uh…going to the cafeteria?
That mostly serves to introduce you to your crew members, which is a fun little extra feature. Also, and this is something I’m not sure I’ve ever seen in a game before, you can technically customize your character a bit, but have to choose between about 5 first and last names. It’s weird.
The bulk of the game is spent, expectedly, on the bridge of your ship. From there, you can work your way through a handful of different missions, largely based on various well-known Star Trek stories (these are limited to stuff involving the original crew, in case that matters to you). This involves interfacing with a number of different systems – communications, science stuff, navigation, weapons, and so forth.
Each mission serves as a puzzle of sorts – you’ll need to communicate with the various members of your crew to get information, perform various science fiction tasks, and make (hopefully not stupid) tactical decisions. There are occasional dialogue trees and often multiple ways to approach a situation (though I’d say more often than not, there tends to be a single, linear solution).
While it can get a bit repetitive going through the same series of menus over and over again, I rather enjoyed ST:SA-SBS. The fact that it calls from major stories in Star Trek history is a nice touch. It’s cool to see how good of a captain I would’ve been during Wrath of Khan (spoiler: it would not have gone well). All of the extra bits, such as getting to know your fellow cadets and a trove of info on races, ships, and so forth in the ship’s computer, all help to make it feel like an authentic experience. If you’re a fan of the franchise, I can honestly say this one is worth checking out for a bit.
The history of Star Trek games is…varied, to put it lightly. There were a few pretty solid point-and-click adventure games in the early 90s, and there have been a handful of cool action and strategy games here and there. A lot of the others, however, are…well, they’re bad. Sometimes really bad. A lot of others are just forgettably mediocre, which makes it hard to just easily say what the best of its adaptations is. For my money, it might be 25th Anniversary – specifically the PC one, and not the NES game of the same name, which is much worse. Don’t play that one.
Next week’s game is another SNES title based on a TV series, but this one is…very, very not the same Star Trek. I’m mildly concerned.