Much of Generations’ appeal comes from the effectiveness of it recreating the film’s atmosphere aboard the Enterprise and its sphere of influence. This is, let’s face it, exactly what people want, and Generations delivers the goods superbly. The story unfolds using a fine combination of roughly three game styles, which are in themselves complicated, engrossing sub-games. The navigation centre involves a strategy element with puzzle-solving in the Enterprise’s very impressive Stellar Cartography room. This is the area in the film that you always wanted to play around in and it allows you to search for and select destinations for the Enterprise. There’s also a considerable amount of frantic ship-to-ship space combat against Klingons, Romulans and the Chodak Dreadnoughts. The basics are similar to A Final Unity’s, but more detailed and somehow more fun. Chasing Soran and his various Trilithium shipments across the sector and developing tactics is one of the most rewarding aspects of the whole game. If there are enemy ships in the system you arrive in, you take command of the Enterprise in a variety of ship-to-ship encounters. Some of these are random, serving no purpose other than to test your flight and gunnery skills, while others are cleverly woven into the story and may lead to new clues or specific 3D missions. Like in A Final Unity, you can manoeuvre the ship, firing phasers and photon torpedoes. It provides a welcome break from the rock-searching and the 3D missions, and transforms the over-complicated system used in A Final Unity into simpler, more exciting battles.