As the latest Star Trek show, Voyager, finally starts to develop a fan following, Spectrum HoloByte has at last released the first in their series of adventures based on the most popular program in the Trek pantheon. Not surprisingly, there's been a lot of buzz around Star Trek: The Next Generation - A Final Unity. It tries very hard to duplicate the TV show it is based on... and it comes very close to succeeding.
One of the most talked-about aspects of A Final Unity is that the entire core cast from STTNG lent their voices to the project and approved their character likenesses. It is an almost creepy experience to be able to consult on an engineering problem with Geordi LaForge, voiced by LeVar Burton. These characters are very familiar, and it is so odd to interact with them. Acute listeners may notice that the dialog occasionally suffers from lackluster delivery, but this is never distracting. One can only imagine how odd it must be for these actors to reprise their popular roles isolated in a recording booth instead of being on the Enterprise set with the rest of the cast.
Through the course of the game, the player is also treated to special effects sequences that are pretty much indistinguishable from those used in the show and the movies. This aspect may get overlooked in some reviews just because the look of the show is so familiar, but this is really some of the hottest graphics work in the biz.
The player's role is not solidly defined; that is, you don't play First Officer Riker (voiced by Jonathan Frakes) through the whole adventure. When you are on the bridge, you make command decisions as Captain Picard (the formidable Patrick Stewart). You can gain advice from the other members of the crew by clicking on them. Need the emotional lowdown on the character you are chatting with on the viewscreen? Ask ship's counselor Deanna Troi, and she'll tell you what you need to know in the peculiarly accented voice of Marina Sirtis. The difficulty levels (Ensign, Lieutenant and Captain) are mostly divided by how much advice is given to the player automatically.
Not everything can be handled from the Enterprise bridge. Eventually the situation will call for an Away Team mission. At Lieutenant and Captain levels, the player chooses his own away team, but the Ensign gets the optimum combination of personnel chosen for him by the program. Within the team, the player gets to pick which character to work through, and the really cool thing is it makes a difference who you pick! When the team finds and heals an injured party, they can either do the obvious thing, which is to have her debriefed by Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden), or you can send in Chief of Security Worf (Michael Dorn). Worf is not much of a diplomat, so instead of trying to comfort the victim, he asks a lot of typically Klingon questions about how the battle went. It's great!
The player's level of control over the events is completely variable through the course of the game. You can start as a wimpy Ensign level, but if at any point you start feeling your "space legs," you can reset the difficulty without having to start over. Combat and navigation can either be delegated to Worf and Geordi (respectively), or can be handled manually for a real challenge.
The adventure is a long and complex one with several subplots along the way to the climax. As with the program it's based on, this game is a bit talk-heavy. There's a lot of information carried in the conversations, and if you have a little trouble getting through some of the pseudo-scientific gibberish, you can use the Enterprise's flight recorder and read any of the last ten conversations that have taken place. The only trouble with this aspect of the game is that it doesn't carry over to the Away Missions. If you get useful information outside of the ship (and you will!) you have to actually write it down or something. If the characters were carrying PADD laptops, or just kept a communications channel open to the Enterprise, the little bit of hedgy continuity could be taken care of, and the feature could be used all the time. Oh well, maybe in the sequel...
The biggest problem with A Final Unity may just be that the designers took on too large a task. So much of this game comes so close to a real duplication of the Next Gen experience, but due to memory limitations and what not, some concessions had to be made. For example, there is no real conference room aboard the Enterprise, so all discussion takes place on the bridge. Also, while the music in the game is dramatic and effective, there's just not enough of it. These may seem like minor complaints, and they are, but they are mainly noticeable because the rest of the game looks and sounds so darn good. Expectations were high for A Final Unity, and it has almost entirely met them, but some fans are bound to get caught up in the "almost." So it goes.
