Reviews

After releasing several compilation tapes of games, ICL rounded out their initial range with this tape containing just one.

Star Trail is certainly the largest of their games. It's the only one that needs a 48K machine and indeed it uses pretty much all the memory available to BASIC.

The game itself is, as the name suggests, a copy of the old Star Trek mainframe game. A few of the names have been changed, presumably for copyright reasons, although there are still Klingons and Romulens (sic) to fight.

It's fairly well featured; you've got long range and short range scanners, torpedoes and phasers, starbases to dock with for supplies and a ship's computer with features like a galaxy map.

In some ways though it's a little too faithful to the source, with a display and command system that's more suited to a terminal than what the Spectrum can manage. That said, so long as you can put up with its cumbersome interface, there's a fairly deep and involving game to be had.

Although not bad for an early effort, it was soon eclipsed by superior games like Mikro-Gen's Star Trek and Silversoft's Starship Enterprise.