Star Trek: New Worlds

Storyline

Star Trek: New Worlds is set in the year 2287, shortly after the events of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. In the opening cutscene, Captain Gibson of the USS Explorer receives orders from Starfleet Command to intercept the Romulan D'talla-class Warbird IRW Melak in the Neutral Zone, and prevent it from setting off an experimental weapon known as "Project Shiva". Although the Explorer is far too late to put a stop to the weapons test, a Klingon D-7 confronts the Melak in an attempt to steal the Shiva technology. The Melak commander instead launches the Shiva projectile at its test target, the shockwave destroying the Klingon ship. However, the weapon itself tears a hole in subspace and allows a huge number of new planets to enter (apparently out of nowhere); the Melak is caught in the gravity well of one such planet and crashes. These new planets are rich in natural resources, and the sector - which intersects Klingon, Romulan, and Federation territory, as well as the Neutral Zone - becomes known as the "Tabula Rasa" (Latin for "blank slate"). The three factions then fight for control of the vast untapped natural resources on these planets. Science scanning of ancient structures on one of the planets eventually awakens a dormant, mighty alien race called the Metar, which the three factions must band together against to overcome.

At the end of the game, the Tabula Rasa is sealed by the detonation of another Shiva device, and the planets return to their former dimension. However, at the very end of the game's final cinematic, several Metar ships are seen to have survived the detonation of the Shiva device, thus leaving room for a sequel. However, Interplay lost its claim to the Star Trek franchise, and no other gaming company seems interested in the New Worlds storyline.

Gameplay

The player can choose between the Klingons, Romulans or the Federation to play as, and each race has 14 missions. Each mission has a certain amount of objectives, like mining certain resources, capture, protect or destroy certain buildings, build specific colonies at the Colony Site, which have to be completed in order to complete the mission.

The Player's colony always starts out with only the Colony Hub as the command post and a Storage facility to store the processed minerals available, requiring the player to build/upgrade all other available buildings. But some missions give the player a slightly more developed colony to ease the job for accomplishing the missions. Buildings built later on in missions include construction yards, vehicle yards, resource processors, power generators, mining stations, science stations, security and arsenal facilities, sickbays, transporter pads, shield generators, defensive buildings such as photon turrets and static disruptors, food growing facilities, as well as living space for colonists. Military units built include APCs (Armed Personnel Carriers), phaser vehicles (Federation), disruptor battletanks (Klingons and Romulans), photon artilleries, and other specific vehicles to each specific race.

Reception

In a preview piece on Star Trek: New Worlds in PC Zone, Mark Hill said that he was "pleasantly surprised" by the game because it was suitable for players who aren't fans of the franchise as well as the "slick and easy to use interface". But he added that there were "enough details here to send any die-hard Trekkie into convulsions of ecstasy." He praised the re-playability offered by the "elaborate" separate story-lines for the Romulans, Federation and Klingons, and described the graphics as "ambitious".