Mine would be:
10. Elite Force & Elite Force II:
This is the only game from post-2000 that I will include on this list, because I am very unimpressed with everything that happened to Star Trek gaming after Activision obtained control over the licence. Star Trek: Elite Force was an enjoyable, if unrealistic, game, set nominally in Star Trek: Voyager's episodes, but containing elements from other parts of the franchise, including a memorable mission on board a mirror-universe ship. Like Voyager itself, it suffered from a tendency to make certain enemies, who should not look weak, appear less of a threat (you know which ones), and was very gung-ho for a game set on-board a science vessel, but out of everything that happened after the Interplay and Microprose stopped making Star Trek games, its probably the most fun. The same can't be said for the sequel, which was another step down for Star Trek games - transferring the focus to the Enterprise E TNG movies and post-Dominion War Alpha Quadrant, but failing to capture the spirit of Star Trek badly, as with most of Activision's work.
9. Harbinger & The Fallen:
These two games aren't actually related, but they both share the setting of Deep Space Nine, and thus I have included them here together. Star Trek: Harbinger was an attempt to do an adventure game in the style of Judgement Rites or A Final Unity, but using DS9 as a setting instead. It wasn't bad, but never really reached the level of those games, despite featuring the entire cast of DS9 reprising their roles (and what a cast that was). Star Trek: The Fallen unfortunately did not have everyone reprise their role, but was a very interesting third-person-shooter, complete with a plot that touched on Bajoran archeology, and features enemies as diverse as Bajoran and Jem'Hadar soldiers. There were three campaigns; one as Sisko, one as Worf and one as Kira - unfortunately Avery Brooks didn't reprise his role, but thankfully Michael Dorn and Nana Visitor did! The Fallen can be made to work with modern systems via nGlide.
8. Generations:
Some people will be surprised that I have chosen to include this not-very-well received and almost forgotten tie-in-game for Star Trek: Generations, in my list. But the reason why this game deserves to be here, and others don't, is that once again, this was actually quite faithful to Star Trek as a setting, and while the game suffered problems, being an early Doom-style FPS, it allowed you to explore some quite diverse and interesting planets - interact with them via an inventory system - and had some decent narrative depth, complete with the entire TNG cast once again reprising their roles. I don't know another game where you can infiltrate a Romulan Outpost in first person, and order a plate of Romulan viinerine from a replicator in their barracks! Or explore the ruins of a Minosian planet for that matter.
7. Klingon Honor Guard:
The best of all attempts to create a Star Trek first-person-shooter. Star Trek: Klingon Honor Guard used the Unreal engine to let players go on a flight of fancy; what would happen if you made a Klingon version of Quake, Unreal or Half-Life - a Klingon Call of Duty? What if instead of a Glock 17 pistol, you had a Klingon Disruptor Pistol? If instead of a space marine, you were a member of the Klingon Special Forces? It managed this, whilst still remaining remarkably faithful to on-screen canon. The missions led you to Klingon colony worlds, the prison planetoid Rura Penthe, and a Klingon battlecruiser, amongst others. It featured voice work by Tony Todd as Kurn and Robert O'Reilly as Gowron! It's hard to forget stumbling through frozen caves whilst trying to get into the security perimeter of Rura Penthe.
6. Fleet Captains:
Not a video game this time, but a part of the recent dramatic upsurge in board games in geek culture in general. Star Trek: Fleet Captains is one of the first examples of an attempt to create the highly-faithful and intelligent games that Star Wars has been getting in recent years - and by far the best I've played. The game is the closest thing so far to a tabletop version of Birth of the Federation. Your starships explore sector-by-sector, finding planets, building outposts, and engaging in scientific and combat missions, against the Klingons, Romulans or Dominion. Unlike games like Star Trek: Catan, which are just a re-skinning of an existing game, and have little to do with the setting, it attempts to model Star Trek faithfully - it's always better when a board game captures the setting it is meant to be depicting. A pity it's hard to get the Romulan Expansion these days. Until Star Trek: Frontiers and Star Trek: Ascendancy come out, this will remain the best - but when they do, all bets are off, as Ascendancy will try to replicate a 4X computer game on tabletop, and Frontiers will use the Mage Knight system to actually lay down new exploration tiles as your ship moves into the unknown!
5. A Final Unity:
What is the best work of fiction involving the beloved Enterprise D crew, which isn't an episode or movie? Easy question. Although it suffered some compatibility problems even at the time of release, you can get Star Trek: A Final Unity working on DOSBox on many modern Windows 7, 8 and 10 systems. Considered by fans to be the equal of a TNG episode, or even a short season, the game is to Star Trek: The Next Generation, what Judgement Rites is to Star Trek: The Original Series - you can navigate, battle, beam down landing parties, solve mysteries, and all with the full TNG voice cast! The plot, as in Judgement Rites and Klingon Academy, was also great. The only reason this game isn't higher in the list, is the quality of the games below being such a high bar - the order of the top five was a narrowly-fought contest. But it rounds out the top five, because it is an all-time classic, and captures the setting perfectly.
4. Klingon Academy & Starfleet Academy:
Talk about faithfulness! Star Trek: Klingon Academy brought back Christopher Plumber and David Warner as General Chang and Chancellor Gorkon! Star Trek: Starfleet Academy brought back William Shatner, Walter Koenig and George Takei as Kirk, Chekov and Sulu! And they were as well-written as some of the motion pictures! Klingon Academy in particular is fondly remembered for being a faithful direct-prequel to the amazing film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which is many people's favorite Star Trek film, above even The Wrath of Khan. It depicted the Klingon Empire of Gorkon and Chang's time from the inside - even enrolling you in their command school, and being taught very realistic political and battle tactics by General Chang himself. In a memorable scene in Starfleet Academy, Kirk discusses his answer to the Kobayashi Maru with one of the potential graduates. Unlike many later games, which defiantly DO NOT deserve to be considered canon, these games emphatically do.
3. Birth of the Federation:
Not only is Star Trek: Birth of the Federation the best Star Trek strategy game ever made, thus far, it's also probably the best 4X game ever made. If this were merely some strategy game re-skinned into a Star Trek game, I would not include it on the list. But as fans know, BOTF lovingly reproduced the Next Generation era, complete with minor species who react as they would in reality, upon first contact - Mizarians surrendering to the first people they come across - Mintakans becoming worshipful of the first Federation or Romulan representative they meet - the Chalnoth and Nausicaans hating the peaceful Federation, but finding the Klingon Empire a far more inspiring society - the Betazoids, Ullians and Vulcans, giving research bonuses, etc. It soaked up thousands of hours of Star Trek fan's childhoods, and playing it today, via Armada Fleet Command's universal installer, it's as great as ever
2. Judgement Rites & 25th Anniversary:
Honestly, I have never played a game more faithful to it's source material than Star Trek: Judgement Rites. It remains the best game ever made for Star Trek by a long shot, and one of the best games ever made, period. The game, and it's sister-game Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (which I have also included here due to it's extreme similarity, but which is not as well written), lets you do literally anything Kirk could do in Star Trek: The Original Series - plot a course to a new star system, beam down a landing party, explore a planet, solve mysteries, fight Klingons and Romulans - and it was as well written as any of the series - featuring the full original voice cast! If there was justice in the world, Judgement Rites would be considered equal canon with Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Animated series. Many fans consider it to be equal to those, and treat it as a lost season of episodes, or a movie. The only reason it doesn't take the top spot is due to the great influence and vintage of the number one. But really, Judgement Rites is the real number 1. They are now available and fully playable on GOG.com and Steam - what a treasure for fans!
1. EGA Trek:
An excellent start to the 90s - the golden age of Star Trek gaming - EGA Trek's expansiveness and accuracy (even the tutorial being presented as a briefing from Starfleet Command), secure it's place as an eternal classic. Subsequent attempts to remake the game have lost some of the spirit, and have been forced to drop Star Trek as a setting due to licensing, but I hope that someday CBS will license a faithful remake. It was itself a remake of the older text-based Star Trek game for early computers, which was apparently ported to almost everything, and enjoyed huge popularity with early computer geeks. If you have the patience to learn a game that requires methodical strategy, do yourself a favor and DOSBox this game. It could be classed as a Roguelike - and thus suits this post-Dark Souls age of hardcore gaming.
END OF LIST
Honorable mentions:
- Bridge Commander
- Starfleet Command
- Star Trek: Klingon
- Star Trek: Borg
Dishonorable mentions:
- Armada & Armada II (for treating starships like disposable tanks, and having a fanfic plot)
- Star Trek: The 2013 Video Game (to call it "Gears of Star Trek" would be too complimentary)
- Away Team (the idea of a squad-based top down away-team game is good; the game wasn't)
- Star Trek Online (where to even begin; 22nd century starships in the 25th century?)
10. Elite Force & Elite Force II:
This is the only game from post-2000 that I will include on this list, because I am very unimpressed with everything that happened to Star Trek gaming after Activision obtained control over the licence. Star Trek: Elite Force was an enjoyable, if unrealistic, game, set nominally in Star Trek: Voyager's episodes, but containing elements from other parts of the franchise, including a memorable mission on board a mirror-universe ship. Like Voyager itself, it suffered from a tendency to make certain enemies, who should not look weak, appear less of a threat (you know which ones), and was very gung-ho for a game set on-board a science vessel, but out of everything that happened after the Interplay and Microprose stopped making Star Trek games, its probably the most fun. The same can't be said for the sequel, which was another step down for Star Trek games - transferring the focus to the Enterprise E TNG movies and post-Dominion War Alpha Quadrant, but failing to capture the spirit of Star Trek badly, as with most of Activision's work.
9. Harbinger & The Fallen:
These two games aren't actually related, but they both share the setting of Deep Space Nine, and thus I have included them here together. Star Trek: Harbinger was an attempt to do an adventure game in the style of Judgement Rites or A Final Unity, but using DS9 as a setting instead. It wasn't bad, but never really reached the level of those games, despite featuring the entire cast of DS9 reprising their roles (and what a cast that was). Star Trek: The Fallen unfortunately did not have everyone reprise their role, but was a very interesting third-person-shooter, complete with a plot that touched on Bajoran archeology, and features enemies as diverse as Bajoran and Jem'Hadar soldiers. There were three campaigns; one as Sisko, one as Worf and one as Kira - unfortunately Avery Brooks didn't reprise his role, but thankfully Michael Dorn and Nana Visitor did! The Fallen can be made to work with modern systems via nGlide.
8. Generations:
Some people will be surprised that I have chosen to include this not-very-well received and almost forgotten tie-in-game for Star Trek: Generations, in my list. But the reason why this game deserves to be here, and others don't, is that once again, this was actually quite faithful to Star Trek as a setting, and while the game suffered problems, being an early Doom-style FPS, it allowed you to explore some quite diverse and interesting planets - interact with them via an inventory system - and had some decent narrative depth, complete with the entire TNG cast once again reprising their roles. I don't know another game where you can infiltrate a Romulan Outpost in first person, and order a plate of Romulan viinerine from a replicator in their barracks! Or explore the ruins of a Minosian planet for that matter.
7. Klingon Honor Guard:
The best of all attempts to create a Star Trek first-person-shooter. Star Trek: Klingon Honor Guard used the Unreal engine to let players go on a flight of fancy; what would happen if you made a Klingon version of Quake, Unreal or Half-Life - a Klingon Call of Duty? What if instead of a Glock 17 pistol, you had a Klingon Disruptor Pistol? If instead of a space marine, you were a member of the Klingon Special Forces? It managed this, whilst still remaining remarkably faithful to on-screen canon. The missions led you to Klingon colony worlds, the prison planetoid Rura Penthe, and a Klingon battlecruiser, amongst others. It featured voice work by Tony Todd as Kurn and Robert O'Reilly as Gowron! It's hard to forget stumbling through frozen caves whilst trying to get into the security perimeter of Rura Penthe.
6. Fleet Captains:
Not a video game this time, but a part of the recent dramatic upsurge in board games in geek culture in general. Star Trek: Fleet Captains is one of the first examples of an attempt to create the highly-faithful and intelligent games that Star Wars has been getting in recent years - and by far the best I've played. The game is the closest thing so far to a tabletop version of Birth of the Federation. Your starships explore sector-by-sector, finding planets, building outposts, and engaging in scientific and combat missions, against the Klingons, Romulans or Dominion. Unlike games like Star Trek: Catan, which are just a re-skinning of an existing game, and have little to do with the setting, it attempts to model Star Trek faithfully - it's always better when a board game captures the setting it is meant to be depicting. A pity it's hard to get the Romulan Expansion these days. Until Star Trek: Frontiers and Star Trek: Ascendancy come out, this will remain the best - but when they do, all bets are off, as Ascendancy will try to replicate a 4X computer game on tabletop, and Frontiers will use the Mage Knight system to actually lay down new exploration tiles as your ship moves into the unknown!
5. A Final Unity:
What is the best work of fiction involving the beloved Enterprise D crew, which isn't an episode or movie? Easy question. Although it suffered some compatibility problems even at the time of release, you can get Star Trek: A Final Unity working on DOSBox on many modern Windows 7, 8 and 10 systems. Considered by fans to be the equal of a TNG episode, or even a short season, the game is to Star Trek: The Next Generation, what Judgement Rites is to Star Trek: The Original Series - you can navigate, battle, beam down landing parties, solve mysteries, and all with the full TNG voice cast! The plot, as in Judgement Rites and Klingon Academy, was also great. The only reason this game isn't higher in the list, is the quality of the games below being such a high bar - the order of the top five was a narrowly-fought contest. But it rounds out the top five, because it is an all-time classic, and captures the setting perfectly.
4. Klingon Academy & Starfleet Academy:
Talk about faithfulness! Star Trek: Klingon Academy brought back Christopher Plumber and David Warner as General Chang and Chancellor Gorkon! Star Trek: Starfleet Academy brought back William Shatner, Walter Koenig and George Takei as Kirk, Chekov and Sulu! And they were as well-written as some of the motion pictures! Klingon Academy in particular is fondly remembered for being a faithful direct-prequel to the amazing film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which is many people's favorite Star Trek film, above even The Wrath of Khan. It depicted the Klingon Empire of Gorkon and Chang's time from the inside - even enrolling you in their command school, and being taught very realistic political and battle tactics by General Chang himself. In a memorable scene in Starfleet Academy, Kirk discusses his answer to the Kobayashi Maru with one of the potential graduates. Unlike many later games, which defiantly DO NOT deserve to be considered canon, these games emphatically do.
3. Birth of the Federation:
Not only is Star Trek: Birth of the Federation the best Star Trek strategy game ever made, thus far, it's also probably the best 4X game ever made. If this were merely some strategy game re-skinned into a Star Trek game, I would not include it on the list. But as fans know, BOTF lovingly reproduced the Next Generation era, complete with minor species who react as they would in reality, upon first contact - Mizarians surrendering to the first people they come across - Mintakans becoming worshipful of the first Federation or Romulan representative they meet - the Chalnoth and Nausicaans hating the peaceful Federation, but finding the Klingon Empire a far more inspiring society - the Betazoids, Ullians and Vulcans, giving research bonuses, etc. It soaked up thousands of hours of Star Trek fan's childhoods, and playing it today, via Armada Fleet Command's universal installer, it's as great as ever
2. Judgement Rites & 25th Anniversary:
Honestly, I have never played a game more faithful to it's source material than Star Trek: Judgement Rites. It remains the best game ever made for Star Trek by a long shot, and one of the best games ever made, period. The game, and it's sister-game Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (which I have also included here due to it's extreme similarity, but which is not as well written), lets you do literally anything Kirk could do in Star Trek: The Original Series - plot a course to a new star system, beam down a landing party, explore a planet, solve mysteries, fight Klingons and Romulans - and it was as well written as any of the series - featuring the full original voice cast! If there was justice in the world, Judgement Rites would be considered equal canon with Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Animated series. Many fans consider it to be equal to those, and treat it as a lost season of episodes, or a movie. The only reason it doesn't take the top spot is due to the great influence and vintage of the number one. But really, Judgement Rites is the real number 1. They are now available and fully playable on GOG.com and Steam - what a treasure for fans!
1. EGA Trek:
An excellent start to the 90s - the golden age of Star Trek gaming - EGA Trek's expansiveness and accuracy (even the tutorial being presented as a briefing from Starfleet Command), secure it's place as an eternal classic. Subsequent attempts to remake the game have lost some of the spirit, and have been forced to drop Star Trek as a setting due to licensing, but I hope that someday CBS will license a faithful remake. It was itself a remake of the older text-based Star Trek game for early computers, which was apparently ported to almost everything, and enjoyed huge popularity with early computer geeks. If you have the patience to learn a game that requires methodical strategy, do yourself a favor and DOSBox this game. It could be classed as a Roguelike - and thus suits this post-Dark Souls age of hardcore gaming.
END OF LIST
Honorable mentions:
- Bridge Commander
- Starfleet Command
- Star Trek: Klingon
- Star Trek: Borg
Dishonorable mentions:
- Armada & Armada II (for treating starships like disposable tanks, and having a fanfic plot)
- Star Trek: The 2013 Video Game (to call it "Gears of Star Trek" would be too complimentary)
- Away Team (the idea of a squad-based top down away-team game is good; the game wasn't)
- Star Trek Online (where to even begin; 22nd century starships in the 25th century?)
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