Speaking of vague bullshit:
Star Trek – The Reckoning of Tomorrow’s Yesterday is what happens when someone designs a game to look good in magazine screenshots.
Stage two drops you into an alien ship filled with vaguely sci-fi blobs and then asks you to organize them. Stage three is where most people bounce, because it involves rescuing miners from an area where everything looks the same and the last miner is stashed in a clone of a room you already checked. Hit detection is trash. Power-ups are technically in the game but usually require backtracking through hell just to reach. Enemies can’t shoot diagonally, which would be great if they didn’t trap your crew in endless stun-lock loops.
And no, you can’t just bring a team of redshirts to soak up hits, because they die instantly and you’ll need at least one actually competent character (Data or Worf,) to make it through areas where damage is unavoidable.
Phaser targeting is laughably bad. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and you’ll end up walking in circles because a wall
looked solid but was actually destructible.
The plot is a diet version of the TNG episode “The Chase,” except instead of Cardassians, we get the Chodak, a new alien species that somehow manages to look both silly and bland. They eat phaser blasts and your team AI often forgets that shooting back is an option. Or you could just cheese them by rotating characters the second one runs out of ammo. Either way, it’s terrible.
There’s a hostage mission on a freighter called the
Nakatomi and it’s so bad most walkthroughs tell you to just skip it.
Romulans exist solely to punish you for exploring. Attack you, whine that you attacked them, repeat. Space battles: Rear torpedoes are better than forward ones, and kiting enemies while spitting fire from your aft like a drunk dragon is actually effective.
Genesis version: Less memory meant smaller maps and slightly better sprite readability. It still sucks, but in a more manageable way. Also, entire chunks of dialogue and lore were cut from the SNES version. Don’t worry, you weren’t missing much. (The SNES version also never explains what the doomsday weapon is or why anyone should care. Some copies are reportedly bugged and literally unwinnable.)
