Star Trek: New Worlds, published by Interplay for PC

SPECS: Pentium II 300 MHz, 64MB RAM, 400MB Hard Disk, 16MB 3D Video-Card, 16-bit Sound-Card, CD-ROM

Well, yet another real-time strategy game hits the market, and I seem to be playing Dark Reign 2 again but with a much more complicated gameplay.

The graphics and gameplay are exactly the same as Dark Reign 2, apart from instead of the usual building a main base and sending a vehicle out to harvest minerals, you have to build mines on certain parts of the landscape, and demolish them once they have run out of material, and hope you have enough minerals to build another. This is where the game falls apart. The mining system is terrible.

Imagine you are being attacked from every angle, and your troops and vehicles are dropping like flies. You are frantically building more troops in the hope you will survive this wave of attacks, and you run out of minerals from your mines. Unfortunately, you cannot build any more mines because you have no more minerals and you cannot build any more troops for the same reason. Time to start the mission over, because you cannot load a saved game as there is no save option.

The game saves when you complete a mission, so if you are on the brink of success and the above scenario happens, you will have to start over. The missions are quite large, so this can get rather annoying.

Also the difficulty curve in the game is so steep you will be giving up before the end of the game due to the saving method.

Graphics 5/5

Sound 3/5

Game-play 3/5

Gamespan 2/5

Overall 3/5