Star Trek Away Team

                  Reviewed by Nick Edmunds

Away Team is a squad based tactical combat game under a Star Trek
license with character types from TNG.  The team itself is
composed of highly trained specialists created by the Federation
as a special ops. unit.  Not much for diplomacy, or the usual
wishy-washy Federation politics, this bunch mean business and
laugh in the face of the prime directive.  Equipped with a ship
fitted with holographic technology, their mission is to
penetrate unnoticed into hostile space and make a nuisance of
themselves.

The first mission acts as a tutorial level with Commander Data
providing tips as you traverse a crash site to rescue the stranded
Klingons.  Further missions continue in this vein, following a
basic standard of: beam in, find/rescue or eliminate and beam out
preferably without being detected.  Intelligence obtained as a

result of completing a mission advances the plot and generates the
next mission.

Subsequent missions allow the selection of team members from a
squad base of comparably dull characters, according to the skills
and equipment you deem necessary, although there's not much leeway
as certain minimum requirements must be adhered to for each
mission.  Similarly, while each character has requisites that are
called on at given situations, there's generally a simpler way
around the task, so that you have to go out of your way to utilise
anything other than the most basic kit.  For example, taking the
Commandos' style "field of view cones" a step further, Away Team
utilises sound cones, enabling your blokes to sneak around the
enemies' aural perception area, although generally it makes more
sense to just shoot them.

Unusually for a Star Trek game the away team itself is composed
only of expendable crew with no core cast members in sight.
That's got to be a logistic mistake; the odds of any unknown face
coming back from any mission are extremely slim, but to fill a
squad with them must surely be some sort of suicide run.  Doesn't
exactly fill you with confidence when you're going into hostile
territory.

It's always harder for a team to play away; the enemies know their
turf better than you and are more comfortable with the
environment.  It's even more of a disadvantage when your squad are
a bunch of numpties.  As a crack team you would expect them to
defend themselves if anyone starts firing at them, but no, the AI
is so bad that the team tend to wibble around like farts in an
airlock. Equip all your team with a weapon and you are ready for
action, or so you would think.  Not only is your team happy to
stand there while being perforated by laser fire, but equip just
one character with a non-offensive item, e.g. Hypospray and the
others refuse to fire unless personally instructed.  Activision
obviously spotted this and rather than devising a decent control
system, came up with 'Pause Time' to allow squad organisation at
hectic points in the gameplay.


Pause Time does exactly what it says on the tin i.e. enables game
time to be paused in order to individually equip and instruct each
character for their next move. The clock is then restarted, the
characters carry out their instructions, and you again take time
out to arrange the next set of operations.  Obviously this method
of play can be disruptive on the flow of action, but without it
you are left with the old faithful rush technique where the entire
group run forward firing at once.  These methods of gameplay are
further frustrated as no squad members are expendable.  So one of
your numpties gets shot (and generally they're asking for it) and
it's game over for the trekster.

However, while your squad are turnips, the enemy have a more
reasonable AI with only slight niggles, e.g. on regaining
consciousness a stunned enemy bloke instantly forgets that
anything was amiss.  A nice touch, and always a gripe of mine, is
that they do respond to visible corpses, so that you need to hide
bodies of fallen enemies by stashing them in cupboards or
teleporting them to the brig.

The timing of Away Teams' release didn't do it any favours as two
other RTS games, Fallout Tactics and Desperados, arrived around
the same time and unfortunately AT is the least successful of the
three.  In its favour AT is true to series with an attention to
detail that one has come to expect from a ST license, but while
this may be enough for hardcore Trek fans to get something out of
it, most will be put off by the gameplay mechanism.












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