Searching For The Unknown
Trek by Brian Watson, 1998

Written by Lachie Dazdarian(July, 2005)

Introduction

Welcome to the second edition of Searching For The Unknown column. I'm not featuring Star Trek: The Capture in this issue as a promised. Unfortunately, this game ended up being too untested and buggy for my taste. I just hate when a game contains bugs that seriously influence on the plot development or the gameplay. The very designer of the mentioned game admitted in the documentation that he didn't find time to completely test his game(play it through). How nice. Taking wild guesses why I can't finish some part of the game, wondering is it because of the bug or me, I find very unappealing. Star Trek: The Capture might appear in one of the next issues but I doubt.

As you see from the title, this issue is dedicated to Trek by Brian Watson and it's a complete coincidence that this game happens in the Star Trek universe too. While I was cruising through my last scoop of games downloaded from www.qb45.com I've found 3-4 very good candidates for the column. Trek was one of those games and since it appealed to me the most I've decided to feature it in this second edition of the column.

About Trek

Trek is, as it's designer calls it, Star Trek strategy turn based simulation and that's probably the best description of the game.

It's quite obvious that Trek isn't a result of an ambitious project since it doesn't feature a lot of content. Trek also isn't a very polished game though it's bug free, well coded and features balanced gameplay. It does have that mini-game charm but you'll notice more the places where the game looks unpolished.

Trek is not your typical turn based strategy game since you only control one(1) Federation ship while other Federation ships are computer controlled same as enemy ships. The objective of this game is very simple. You must destroy all Klingon and Borg ships on the level map and when I say "you" I'm referring to the entire Federation fleet. You are just a small wheel in the whole battle machine and that's what about Trek gameplay really is. Game controls are very intuitive and are done by mouse. You move your ship with right mouse button while with left mouse button you perform a function. You have seven function at disposal: set phasers, set torpedoes, ram, dock with a base, show map, pass a turn and self destruct. By moving the mouse cursor over any ship or base in your vicinity you can check it's status.

Both sides, Federation and Klingon, have bases and by docking on your bases you can repair and rearm your ship when needed. Playing Trek is pretty much consisted of attacking enemy ships, getting back to a Federation base for a quick fix(:P) and getting back to battle again. You fight against enemy ships with phasers and torpedoes. Your ship can carry only a limited amount of torpedoes and they are, of course, more powerful than phasers. All ships are equipped with shields and armor. When your shields are down your armor will decrease with enemy hits and your ship systems will receive damage too. Your shields are restored in each turn but can't go above the armor strength. If any of your systems gets heavily damaged you won't be able to shoot torpedoes, your phasers won't be effective, your crew will start to die and similar, depending on the damaged system(s). So once your shields are down get out of the battle! All this applies to other ships as well(Federation and Klingon).

Trek's graphics are average. The game is coded in SCREEN 12 mode and the designer didn't show any interest to work with more than 16 colors. Ship sprites are ok, as much they can be in 16 colors. I mean, they function perfectly in this game but they sure won't get praised for their quality. I did disliked the look of Klingon base which in the chosen graphic style should have been done better. Also, Borg cubes simply look wrong with them purple lines and they are too small compared to Federation and Klingon ships. If the designer took some trouble to code so that a Borg cube fills 4 sectors and decided to work in 256 colors Trek would look much better. Other objects that appear in the game are only suns and they are nothing but yellow circles. I don't want you to get the impression that the game graphic is bad. I'm just saying it leaves so much space for improvement. I wouldn't like to see someone making a remake of Trek and not taking that minimum effort to advance the look of the original.

Trek features nice sound effects, mostly speech messages which seem to be made with some sort of speech synthesizer. The game really benefits from having sound effects though some silent and non-intrusive background music would be cool too.

Since I already explained how the game is played I should say something more about the very gameplay. Like I said before, in Trek you only control one ship while other 15+ Federation ships are controlled by computer which makes you feel very insignificant in the whole conflict. The game is consisted of 10 levels and each level ends when all the enemy ships(both Borg and Klingon) get destroyed. A cool thing is that Borg attacks both Federation and Klingon ships. By destroying enemy ships and bases you get better ships with better shields, higher number of torpedoes and similar. If you destroy Federation ships you will get demoted and get weaker ships. I should warn you that your torpedoes can hit friendly Federation ships even if you have aimed one toward an enemy ship. A Federation ship mustn't be in your line of fire if you are shooting torpedoes on an enemy ship. Suns can also block your line of fire(this rule only applies on torpedoes).

There is four classes of Federation ships and you start with a class 2 ship. You will be mainly worried about getting "kills" in order to be promoted and to get better a better ship. Your ship is pretty much powerless against two enemy ships unless they are class 1(or class 2 if you have a class 4 ship) so you will be mostly attacking in groups. Once the enemy ship is damaged it will try to escape the battle in order to reach his base to repair. Federation ships follow the similar if not the same tactic. You will also find yourself in situations when you are heavily damaged and are trying to escape from 2 or more enemy ships. In these situation you won't hesitate from luring enemy ships onto another Federation ship so they would leave you alone and pick on another prey. A very cowardly and low thing to do but the only way to survive in this game. Don't get me wrong, the gameplay is highly addictive and fun just the whole way of playing the game feels weird. You will very rarely feel that you have participated in the final level victory and when you reach level 10 you will so wish you could somehow control the other Federation ships. I won't reveal it more but you won't like it.

Trek is one of those games which easily could have been so much more. Brian Watson was definitely on to something with Trek gameplay since this is a very fun game to play. Too bad he was not interested to expand it on so many possible ways. Trek would really benefit from things like a save game option, highscore/kills counter or send orders/messages feature. Emergency messages when in bad situations and ability to give orders to other Federation ships once you get promoted to class 4 ship would be so cool. And finally, the ability to play the game in the classic turn based strategy mode, where you control all the Federation ships. Still, how much we miss these things while playing Trek so much these flaws leave us, game designers, space for a BETTER remake. And that's another reason why I'm featuring this game. If you are looking for an idea for a new game Trek might help you. Or not. Not important. If nothing else, this game will definitely provide you several hours of top notch fun.

Final score
5/10

Download: trek.zip

Run the INSTALL batch file first(unless you unpack the game in c:\trek directory) and then run the shortcut(RunMe!.pif).

That's it for this issue. Hope you enjoyed my article and will try out Trek. For the next issue I'm preparing something special, Lunatix. I think Na_th_an will especially like this game. ;)

I hope I'll be able to submit it before my summer break. I won't be able to get online during the summer(well, it's not very convenient) so I won't be able to submit anything from around middle of the July till somewhere in early September. Cheers!