- Original Release: 1992
- Developer: Interplay
- Publisher: Interplay
- Platform: DOS
With very impressive production values, not only does this have a great visual style, but it’s also fully voiced with the full cast of The Original Series. It’s a point and click adventure game much closer to the likes of Monkey Island than previous games, which is a style that suits Star Trek extremely well
25th Anniversary comprises of 7 missions, which all feel like they could have been original episodes, with some interesting stories and some returning characters, and one is even a sort of prequel to Wrath of Khan. Although I did find that slightly odd because it starts with a Federation facility with a virus outbreak that only affected Romulans, with Spock saying it should be safe for everyone to beam over. I thought this was strange because of the link between Romulans and Vulcans and, sure enough, Spock gets ill, creating a timer for this mission (something I don’t like in games like this, I like slowly investigating everything). That said, the main parts of the mission are overall great.
Throughout the game you also get involved in ship combat. These parts of the game are horrible to control and are frustrating. The game would be better off with a simpler system where you give commands to your crew. One particularly annoying one involves a cloaked ship and you just have to hope that they don’t cloak too much to recharge shields – some of these battles are overly long.
Overall, 25th Anniversary is a really good Star Trek game, and it would be really nice to see a refreshed version that changes the ship combat and fixes some annoyances (like silencing repeated voice lines).
Where to get
How to play Star Trek: 25th Anniversary on Windows 11
The Steam/GoG versions are fully configured to run on Windows 11.
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I could never get past the 1st landing. I just played the opening ship battle over & over again.
This was tough! I never finished it. It was very much in the tradition of Sierra games like King’s Quest and Space Quest.
Agreed….it was hard, but very much in the Sierra tradition. I don’t recall ever finishing it myself, but I played it across quite a few different computers I had….including playing it on a greyscale laptop! 🙂
This was my favorite Star Trek game from the ‘90s. While I never was able to get far into the game, it did a good job capturing the feel of TOS using early home computers.
So, *so* good.
It was a bear to get working in the late DOS/early Windows 95 days, since it needed conventional memory to work with rather than expanded RAM. But once you’d got config.sys and autoexec.bat sorted it was fantastic.
I played this game religiously as a kid. I had seen all the movies, but hadn’t yet seen the original series, so most of my formative memories about this era of Star Trek come from this game–the midi versions of the classic themes especially. I never heard the voices because we didn’t have a SoundBlaster at the time, but I still think about this game all the time.
Legit, I’d like to see them put out a game in this style (obviously with updated graphics) put out for Lower Decks – I feel like that would be right up the alley for the Cerritos gang, rather than some kind of full 3D platformer action-adventure thing.
This one’s available on GoG and Steam. I didn’t find ship combat taht annoying, but it is a bit of a deviation from the point and click of the rest of the game.