As Close to Being in an Episode of Star Trek Voyager as it Gets.
Written: Sep 29 '02 (Updated Sep 29 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fantastic story, settings, & characters.
Cons: Short single player.
The Bottom Line: Excellent single player, great multiplayer, what's not to like?
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| grimjack2's Full Review: Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force |
This game is for anyone who enjoys watching episodes of Star Trek. Especially the television series “Voyager”. This game actually manages to capture not just the look and feel of the television show, but it actually captures a lot of the morality, the excitement, the feeling of exploring, and the sense of awe when a truly original discovery has been made.
A lot of the game feels like you are watching an episode of the show, and that isn’t a bad thing. Unlike Half-life where you never have a cut scene, this game has many. The camera zooms out into letterbox (nice touch) and using the game’s engine we get exterior scenes, often with our character in the third person.
The game starts with a brilliant opening. You are fighting the Borg, but aren’t as defenseless as the Voyager crew should be. Seven of Nine has provided you with a weapon that will hurt the Borg to some degree, but with a warning that they will eventually adapt to the weapon. As powerful as the individual Borg are however, you are able to shoot wall mounted Borg Nodes that when destroyed ‘power down’ all the nearby drones and some force fields and shields nearby. As you work your way through the deck, you come across a few cinematic moments, like when an injured crewman shoots out a bridge underneath some approaching Borg sending them into an abyss. There are a few environment puzzles, like figuring out how to cross a chasm, or get to a higher floor. The Borg teleporting in all around you is actually a scary thing, and the look and sounds are dead-on, as is the case with most of the game’s settings. Just as you think you’ve rescued your crew, you cannot get open their cell, so you decide to shoot the controls. Your crew yells at you to stop, but too late. You fire your phaser, an explosion seems to happen. Everything goes white. Next thing you see is that you have really only been on the Holodeck, and you’ve just failed a training mission. This is a brilliant opening for a game! It puts you into the fit of the action right away, and it is very heavy action, so you even get a feel for the later game.
When I think about how I said the game reminds me of an episode of the show, actually, about a year after I first saw the game, an episode aired that somewhat resembles the game. The episode is the one where Voyager is stuck in a ‘void’ where their energy is quickly running out, and all the ships inside are at a constant war with each other to strip the newcomers of their supplies. Voyager tries to create a mini-Federation of ships to work together to try and escape the environmental trap. In the game, you are trapped in a void with a number of other ships, some of which have been there so long that they have formed an alliance with others for the purpose of raiding freshly trapped ships.
This works out great for those who remember the old time 1st person shooters that were comprised of levels. Here, each level is often an enemy ship that you teleport on board for in order to perform a different task for each one. Usually you can see outside the ship from a window or damaged corridor and can pick out some of the other ships you’ve visited floating in nearby space.
There is even one level that involves a lot of stealth. However, if I thought sometimes I was ‘hidden’ in Deus Ex when clearly I wasn’t, this game is far worse. Just crouching in a well lit corridor may allow a Klingon to walk right past you. Generally speaking though, the maps are excellent, and so is this one. There is some real tension in the stealth games as you cross over a beam above a Klingon mess hall. You hear snippets of conversations a lot of these times, and they are often funny.
The game really does feel like you are progressing through each ‘chapter’. Some are brief (usually those on the Enterprise) where you are trying to stop a warp core breach countdown, or get behind some damaged area to power down a weapon system or something. Even with all the scripting however, this game really wants to be a 1st person shooter, and that is certainly not an insult!
The game’s graphics are very good. It is based on the Quake 3 engine, and so there are lots of curves and fluid designs. Especially with an early ship that is supposed to remind us of a living creature. And each ship does feel distinctly different depending on the type of aliens that inhabit it. Walking around Voyager even looks and feels right. In order to make ‘small’ levels or routes of attack, there seems to be an awful lot of no turning back type of elevators and doors that lock behind you for no reason. You would think there would be no reason to work your way back in a game with purposes instead of just wiping out all the enemies, but I found myself wanting to go back to find health or weapon energy many times.
The graphics are also true to the series. The menus and in game controls look like Federation ship controls. The zoom in feature has the information like the show’s binoculars do. Killing an enemy with a phaser has him dissolve just like it looks in the shows as well. And the sound effects are all dead on, as would be expected since that is the easiest to emulate.
The voice acting is also very good, and is done by almost the whole cast. Only 7 of 9 didn’t have her voice recorded. Having everyone (but one) provide their own voice really helps with the illusion of being in an episode. And these people know how to speak their lines. Probably Tuvok most of all. He handles the excellent tutorial.
There is a separate tutorial that has Tuvok walking you through obstacles in the holodeck. You get some weapons training, but mostly movement. The look and feel here are perfect, even when you are on a replicated Hirogen ship. You see the weapons on the wall and the netting just like we saw their scout ships as having on the show.
From here on there are a few holodeck training missions, but other than those, now characters can die around you. In one scene you raise up a force field and watch a fellow crewman dissolve in a fiery explosion just behind the field. Who ever thought a Star Trek game would allow you to have a fellow crewman killed? You also will feel bad when you lose some of your teammates, obviously scripted or not.
Like the show, the game doesn’t want you to play by killing everything in sight, but instead there are actually a number of clever puzzles that aren’t just of the find the keycard type of variety. You have to change (destroy) your environment many times in order to get to new locations.
Most of the early weapons are right out of the show, and have excellent effects. You can actually incinerate opponents with your standard Federation rifle’s secondary mode, and even the phaser has a ‘destroy’ mode. If I have any complaints about them, it might be that the weapons don’t feel too different, and that is even with the dual modes available. There are two sources of energy for the weapons, and I stuck primarily with the best weapon with each type of ammo. Multiplayer mode seems to make better use of the various types.
I should note that it is very clever how they work out how shields, health, weapon energy and recharge stations work. Like in Half-life, your suit converts and picks up charges from various sources and helps to heal you and power your weapons. Not quite in line with the show, but it worked for me.
The controls are standard, but was one place where I felt a little let down. There is no easy lean to the right & left. You have a lean key, and then must choose which direction to lean. It was very annoying actually, and impossible to lean and zoom at the same time. In truth the enemies shots are so bad that it wasn’t really a problem, but it helps with some of the gun turrets in a few of the missions.
Another larger complaint I had with the game is that it was never very difficult. This isn’t always a bad thing, but in all fairness, no part was hard, except maybe the final boss. Even then, it still wasn’t a huge problem. Just a lot of reloads and try again.
Even most of the aliens aren’t difficult. The aliens tend to just charge at me, although a few humanoid scavengers did duck and cover behind obstacles. Everyone else sat and fired, or charged and slashed. This was most disappointing when compared with how well your teammates AI was handled. They did a great job of acting on their own, and helping take out enemies coming at different directions from where you were facing.
It seems pretty cool fighting alongside your teammates at first, but two things really made it annoying. First off, at least 85% of the enemies are only firing at you. Those that only melee attack will literally run all around your teammates (even getting stuck against them) in order to get at you. Secondly, your teammates are practically invulnerable. I’m not that worried about saving them as opposed to myself. Thirdly, if you aren’t at the front of the group, they are constantly getting in the way of your firing, which forces you to the front of the line each time. And fourthly, I don’t think my teammates were issued very decent guns. They seem to have to shoot at about a 10 to 1 ratio to my own in order to stop an enemy.
I do want to compliment the game though for the variation between your opponents. Some of them just seem to have different skins, but I didn’t mind considering how good they looked. We see lots of enemies, and it is clever how they have the rag tag scavenger fleets (composed of humans, Klingons, Hirogen and the pollution spewing aliens whose species name I cannot remember) working together to try and stop your progress.
Exploring a Borg cube is everything a trekkie ever dreamed of, right down to discovering the chamber containing the vinculum, which is sort of the main CPU for the Borg ship. I felt a little sense of awe walking through one of the large ‘open’ chambers on the interior of the ship where you could see several levels above and below you all around. You actually return to this area on the other side, I think more than once. Hearing the Borg teleporting all around you is certainly a scary site. And I love the fact that as they are targeting you, they have a red laser beam target. Seeing these coming over your shoulders while you are crouched is very scary.
The Borg teleport away when killed. Destroying one of their power nodes makes them lean over and fall asleep. Neat effect. The story in this level plays out great as well. At some moments in the Borg cube, seven of nine seems confused and you have to worry for her safety.
A second half of the Borg cube involves moving into a section of the cube overrun with species 8472. This half of the level really allows you to witness an interesting site. Many Borg torsos torn in half by these creatures from a fluidic space dimension. They charge at you ready to fight in close quarters. You really have to be on your guard around them.
Take on species 8472 satisfies anyone’s craving for an “Aliens” type of encounter. They appear, and charge at you, similar to the Aliens in “Aliens vs Predator”. Too bad they don’t have them dropping from ceilings and really working to surround you. Just charge and slash mostly. Interestingly enough, the Hirogen feel a little like the predators from that game, just like they do on the show.
Actually, in this game you come across not one, but two species that the Borg are afraid of. The ‘true’ enemy who has trapped all these aliens here is supposedly more powerful than anything the Borg have dealt with before.
I did like the fact that once I died on a Borg Cube, and I got a cut scene of myself now assimilated by the Borg. Another time I fell into space and had a shot of me free falling away from the action. There are a few unique death movies, but they are sparse enough that I just may not have died all that often in the game to see them all.
The Borg ship also offered me one of the more blatant ‘choices’ in the game. I really don’t know if there is any advantage to solving it or not, except for seeing a different cut scene. I read in a hint guide that if you manage to save one person early on (that I did not) he gives you a clue. Not quite “Deus Ex”, but a variety in gameplay always makes a story seem more real to me.
I was a little confused while on a Federation ship. I think they were supposed to be ‘evil’ Federation members since they mention an agony chamber like the other dimension we witnessed in the original series, and on Deep Space Nine, but I’m not sure if they ever made that really clear. Come to think of it, the ship actually looked more like an old Star Trek ship than it did look like one of the newer ones.
Another level has you board a ‘ghost ship’. The gravity is low in places, and the effect is pretty good. You jump at least twice as high as normal, and you actually float a little instead of dropping down. The ghost ship is an exciting level because it is basically a giant robotic ship, and the maintenance droids on board act as a sort of ‘immune system’, and you are the viral infestation trying to take control of the ship. There are a small variety of mechanical attack units, many of which are well animated. One depressing thing I noticed though was that they completely explode, yet you can be right inside the blast and wont get hurt at all.
A number of levels take place on Voyager itself. One very cool level has you trying to repel some nasty insect invaders on board the ship. Running through the corridors, you come across various crewmembers who have been killed, rifles near their bodies, as you fight your way through the masses of insectoids eating through the walls of the ship. The map changes in front of you as the aliens come through the walls.
There are probably over two dozen different types of creatures in the game, but they probably can be broken down to four or six ‘similar’ monsters with very different skins. Later flying robots just feel like some flying insects from earlier. Most of the humanoids act and move the same way. I shouldn’t pick on them too much for this though, since I’m really glad for the variety they do give us, and the skins look fantastic. Periodically they give us the feeling like we are fighting a boss monster, but we never really are. Like coming across the demons at the end of the first chapter of Doom, we see so many more of them later that they certainly aren’t horrible boss monsters like we felt like they were when we first saw them.
Just how much is playing this game like watching an episode of the show? Well, a lot of the lessons about logic and morality is here. You will learn the lesson of the few sacrificing for the many. You see what good can happen if you put yourself at risk to save another. And you will see that doing good deeds for a newly met alien species will often benefit you later.
And like a good episode of Voyager it seems too short. After about 15 hours of game play, I was ready to move on to the multiplayer part of the game. First off, it took me a little while to find since you run that separately from the desktop. It clearly shows its Quake 3 root here. All the maps take place on the holodeck, so killing is never an issue. The bots have some great AI, but never seem to work together against you too well. The weapons still disappointed me here a bit, but there is something to be said for having lots of lasers lighting up the areas all around you as you run across a large open area.
The choices of skins are fantastic and ad a lot to the game since they don’t even all move the same way. You can clearly see the weapons the enemies have in their hands, and the death animations are done exceptionally well. And I don’t know if this is a good thing or not, but when playing as a team with bots, you can pause the game to issue orders to your bots. Since the computer can do some stuff instantaneously I guess this is a fair thing to do, but if the deathmatch suddenly starts feeling turn based, then you aren’t playing it right.
In short, the complaints are minor, the accolades are major. This game is selling for less than $10 in many retail stores. I recommend it whole heartily!
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
grimjack2
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Location: San Rafael, CA, Marin County
Reviews written: 181
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Film is my favorite art form. I live a life of constant amelioration.
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