Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy puts the player in the role of a Starfleet cadet undergoing training aboard training vessels under the supervision of instructors, among them the legendary Captain Kirk, voiced by William Shatner himself. The 1997 game belongs to the wave of space simulators that in the nineties drew on the Star Trek license, and it focuses purely on cockpit combat between ships — unlike later entries in the series, this isn't about sprawling strategy or space exploration, but a sequence of training missions and tests with a clearly defined objective.

The player gradually rises through the ranks, completes scenarios inspired by classic episodes of the show, and learns to pilot increasingly advanced Federation ships as well as face off against Klingon and Romulan vessels, with each faction flying and fighting differently in the simulator. The missions are built as self-contained scenarios with a clear brief and an evaluation at the end, which sets the game apart from the looser space simulators of the time and makes it more of a gradual campaign of rising difficulty than an open sandbox game where the player could freely choose what to do and in what order.

The graphics used the then-current 3D-accelerated ship models, and the game was one of the more technically ambitious Star Trek titles of its era on personal computers, including support for the new graphics accelerators of the time, which allowed smoother and more detailed rendering of combat than older, software-rendered titles. The voice acting of the show's main characters, especially the presence of William Shatner in the role of mentor, is still one of the reasons the game has kept a good reputation among fans, even decades after release and despite being primarily a training title rather than a story-driven one.

Why play it: For Star Trek fans looking for an honest ship-combat training simulator with voice acting from the original show cast, not an overly complex strategy game.