Star Trek: Elite Force 2

Star Trekking a merry first-person course onto a PC near you. Richard enlightens us.

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Your talents don't go unnoticed though and pretty soon Captain Picard himself brings the Hazard team back together to see if such a squad has a role to play on board normal star ships (how many red-shirted ensigns had to die before this was realised?). Soon after this the main story kicks in involving two new alien races, the Attrexians and the Idryll. This is also where the games main failing begins to appear. Star Trek has a wealth of information that can be drawn and built upon. So why add yet another alien race, that in turn requires its own back story. Particularly why add a rather generic alien artefact plot. It's almost as if there are two games thrown together here, one that is pure Star Trek and another that is like an Unreal or Quake outing.

For example, to me by far and away the best level is at the start. You are called to the USS Dallas that is adrift in space. You start by beaming aboard with your Hazard team crewmates wearing space suits. The ship's power is down and the level has a cold eerie feel to it thanks to the great atmospheric soundtrack and lighting. The gravity system is malfunctioning and cargo canisters float above you. You go over a display console to unlock the doors from the cargo bay. Then comes the 'money shot'. As the door to the shuttle bay opens it is accompanied by a burst of cold air and a dead body floats into the centre of the room. Then you walk into the shuttle bay to gaze out, past the emergency force field, to see the two huge warp nacelles at either side of the ship. It is gaming nirvana. That's also only the start of what is a masterfully put together section that has a gradual build up to its crescendo. You power up the ships systems seeing the authentic looking displays light up. You have to crawl through Jeffries tubes, catching glimpses of aliens scuttling around. Finally a big fire fight erupts toward the end to cap it all off.

But then there are all these other levels that just seem hugely out of place. Underground alien facilities, caves, industrial refiners, many of these levels could fit into practically any first person shooter. That's not to say they're not good, all of them are in fact well put together, they just don't seem to gel with each other. This also translates to the weapons. There are really nice phasers and phase rifles that are authentic to the show. The sniper rifle, that made a brief appearance in DS9, is added at a later date. Some interesting alien weapons are also thrown in for variety, one of particular note has a neat secondary fire mode that creates a pool of explosive gas that you can ignite. They should have stopped there, but instead they looked through their list and realised they didn't have a shotgun type of weapon or a rocket launcher and so these are bundled in without regard for consistency. You can sense the checklist being ticked off as you play through the game. A sniping level, some abandoned buildings, maybe a bit of alien cocooning, oh wait we forget the molten lava level that means we also need levels in the snow. And so on.

I like to be immersed in a game, and in the same way you wouldn't expect an 'Aliens' game to feature a Tomb Raider level, or a Star Wars game to suddenly become Rainbow Six, so too would you expect a Star Trek game to stay true to its setting. When it doesn't, it jars you out of the game quite unceremoniously. The worst instance of this is when you go to meet the Idryll scientists for the first time. Imagine if you will that you wanted to create a believable alien race in a game. What might you have the female scientist wear? A uniform, a hardwearing suit to cope with harsh alien conditions, perhaps a coat of some kind? Well Ritual entertainment choose a bikini! It's misguided decisions like that which lie at the heart of the franchises current crisis.