Star Trek Timelines: a great adventure?

What I always admire in a franchise is when it is able to make a virtual world of it’s own, a world that spans decades and still holds true to everything that is once created. One of my favourite examples here is always Star Trek, but the same is true for Doctor Who, where you can follow the entire timeline and find no flaws. I still have the Star Trek Encyclopedia, that details everything in the Star Trek universe up till ….And everything was right, character re-appeared and their history was firmly in place. One could track the development over the years of communicators and phasers, and it made sense that progress had stepped in. You know what I mean?

Not surprisingly there are many, many Star Trek games, everything from card games, to board games, video games and some console games. In video games alone the count is some 90 games now, released on every kind of platform you can think off. They range from simulation to adventure/ action games, and of course, a lot of shooters in space. And even though the Star Trek name is used often, you can’t exactly say the quality matches the TV show. Looking at an article on Metacritic from some years ago, it’s clear that the reviews haven’t exactly been raving. Still, I haven’t been able to find many that appeal to me. Years ago I tried several games on the PC, but I remember we had a lot of problems getting them to work on a Windows computer. Still we spent many hours enjoying played my first Star Trek game, Judgment Rites (1983) and a bit later on DS9 Harbinger (1996), but we could never get Star Trek: 25th anniversary to work. That’s money down the drain, however nice the box looked.

I would have loved a good handheld game, but they never made any but the mediocre Tactical Assault. Maybe the new game that is set to be released on iOS/ Android will do the trick for me.Star Trek Timelines is a strategy roleplaying video game developed by Disruptor Beam. In the game you will command a starship and assemble a crew of your favorite Star Trek characters while steering the fate of the galaxy through diplomacy, science and force of arms. Now that sounds like something I would like!

Star Trek Timelines offers challenges that you can choose to tackle in different ways depending on what characters you have chosen. You pick an away team for most of them, though there are also ship battles in space to change things up. The storyline is said to be promising, with Q making an appearance, introducing a temporal calamity that serves as a mechanism to mix all eras of Star Trek together in a logical way. As you can pick your favourite characters this way, the fans will be pleased. The game has been released to both iOS and Android today, January 14th, so check it out! If you want to get a little more info, and partake in the forums that are of course up and running, find the developers site here. I’m giving it a try, it looks promising!