Star Trek: Klingon Academy - Release and Reception

Release and Reception

Klingon Academy was shipped on six CD-ROM discs. Once the game went gold in June 2000, Interplay terminated the entire development team, which did not bode well for the future prospects of the game. Game expansions and a promised mission builder (which was never formally released or supported) were never released. Two minor technical patches were later released by a skeleton crew of staff kept on the project, but Interplay had effectively ended their support.

Critical reception to the game was mixed to positive, with GameRankings reporting a review average of 73% among professional critical sources. IGN gave the game a score of 7.8/10, and GameSpot a 6.7/10.

The game's graphics were considered to be adequate for its time, as the destruction of enemy vessels indicated a strong attention to detail. A player could blast holes through enemy vessels, blow off warp nacelles and cause other damage that would produce colorful particles "leaking" into space. Many players and reviewers characterized playing the game as like being in a Star Trek movie, praise that was a vast improvement over StarFleet Academy's criticisms. Vessels were intricately detailed and featured a wide variety of weapons, designs and appearances. Klingon Academy's soundtrack, composed by Inon Zur, was considered well-done and dramatic, creating a uniquely operatic Klingon atmosphere during combat. Complaints were voiced about model and texture complexity, however.

Upon release, the game was rather buggy and unstable, which is not atypical of new PC releases. Interplay did develop patches to improve or repair these issues, but bugs still remain. The most problematic of these issues is with regards to mission scripting. If an event doesn't properly trigger, either due to a poorly designed mission or the player's inability to determine how to play through events, it can become impossible to finish or even fail the mission. This can create unnecessary frustration because the player may need to play the same mission many times in order to figure out just how to proceed.

Other complaints against the game by game reviewers included the interface being too complex and inaccessible, and that these features were perhaps not adequately documented by the game manual. Klingon Academy fans, however, may see these features instead as strengths. The artificial intelligence of the ships was also a cause for complaints. Enemies frequently come at the player on a collision course, which can destroy both ships.

GameSpy.com praised the game, stating, "With top talent like Christopher Plummer and David Warner reprising their roles from The Undiscovered Country and a story that could have easily been made into feature film, Interplay's Star Trek: Klingon Academy is as much an entertainment experience as it is a computer game," and praised the game's cinematic visual effects and the measured pace of combat. GameSpot's review summarized the game as "an extremely ambitious simulation that provides plenty of original gameplay but fails to adequately refine its presentation," citing overly complex controls and poor AI pathfinding as major obstacles.

Overall the development of Klingon Academy did rival that of most motion pictures, the marketing and advertisement did not have an equally robust budget or commitment behind it. Although Interplay was receptive to fan sites desiring previews of the Star Trek games, the exposure was apparently inadequate for a game needing to overcome the stigma attached to the franchise after prior disappointments in movies, TV series, and the game's own predecessor.