Jean-Luc Picard ate my Tribble. (Star Trek Voyager - Elite Force 2 (PC))

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	Star Trek Voyager - Elite Force 2 (PC)
Date:	13/02/06 (242 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Above average FPS. Should run on most recent PCs.

Disadvantages: Not as griping as the first game or as it should be. Nothing to add to the standard FPS gameplay.

After surviving the dangers of the Delta Quadrant in "Star Trek: Elite Force", Alex Munro is disappointed to learn that Starfleet has no further use for the Hazard Team. He's been assigned a position at Starfleet Academy, teaching students until Jean-Luc Picard, who likes the idea of a hazard team, reassigns him to the new Enterprise E.

Almost immediately, the Enterprise receives a distress signal from the USS Dallas. Investigating this incident leads the Enterprise and the Hazard Team to an outpost of a civilisation who has recently applied for membership to the Federation. They've recently come under attack from a previously unseen life form. It's up to Munro and his newly reformed Hazard Team to lend assistance where needed and get to the bottom of the mystery of this new, aggressive life form.

Star Trek: Elite Force 2 starts off with a level that looks as if it could have come from the first game. It's set at the same time as the very last episode of Star Trek: Voyager, as the ship escapes the Borg and returns to the Alpha Quadrant. In fact, the first playable level could have been in that last episode. After that, you're based on the Enterprise E (which means that this game takes place after the last 'Next Generation' film).

The game was originally released mid-2003, so if you have a relatively new PC, you'll get good performance from the game. I certainly had no problems running EF2 on my PC (see below for specifications).

ST:EF2 is a first person shooter based on the (now ancient) Quake 3 technology, however the graphics still manage to be quite detailed, and compared to other games from around that time, hold up well. The creators of the Quake 3 engine, id software, are renowned for their 3D game engines, so the creators of EF2, ritual entertainment, have a solid base on which to build a good game.

For the most part, they do quite well given the licence. Being a Star Trek licence, EF2 instantly runs into advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages is that of familiarity. Not too many people will be unaware of Star Trek in some shape or form, and using the 'Next Generation' characters/timelines as the backdrop for the plot will help draw people into the plot. The disadvantage is that Star Trek was one of those shows that tended to be a morality tale, so you're not encouraged to do anything too naughty while you're off saving the universe.

Still, it's a decent enough FPS for the PC although I'd personally liked to have seen a little bit more variety in the gameplay. I do like FPSs, but sometimes the constant running and shooting can get very tiresome. EF2 tries to address this in a number of ways. Between each 'shooty' mission, there are 'information gathering' missions where you get to stroll around the Enterprise-E, talking to your crewmates and any alien visitors you may have brought on board. These vary the pace of the game, and this helps, but sometimes it would be nice if there was more to do than go from A to B and talk to a crewmate as the 'information gathering' missions tend to be.

The second method for changing the pace is the use of the good old Star Trek tricorder which, for those of you not into the Star Trek thing, is like a handheld electronic Swiss army knife that has a multitude of uses. In gameplay terms, this means that the tricorder gives you a couple of extra vision modes – gas tracer (trace invisible gas to the source), biometric scanner (find those hidden lasers) and a mode for identifying weak spots in rock/doors or walls (but I can't remember what that's called). In addition to these vision modes, the tricorder can also be used to unlock doors or fix machines, and sometimes doing one of these triggers a little subgame to give your grey matter a bit of a going over. I never found these to be particularly difficult, but it was a nice diversion for a minute or so.

The graphics and sound were good enough for a game nearly three years old. The graphics are bog standard fayre, but I got fed up with how dark a lot of the levels were. Compared to Star trek episodes which are usually quite bright, most of these levels were not well lit, and I got fed up squinting at the screen trying to spot the bad guy hiding behind the rock or crate. Having the odd daylight or well lit level would have helped.

The sounds are excellent. Trekkies might be excited by the prospect of Star Trek actors lending their voice to the characters – Tim Russ, Patrick Stewart and Dwight Schultz all appear as Tuvok, Jean-Luc Picard and Reg Barclay respectively and do an excellent job as you might expect. Also impressive are the usual Star Trek sound effects - the swishing of the doors, the transporter sounds etc.

The controls are what you would normally find on a FPS game and are fully customisable, so if the default set doesn't suit, then they can be easily configured.

Apart from the seeming repetitive nature of the levels (mostly due to the darkness), the main drawback is in the story. ST:EF had a good story that seemed good quality enough to be an actual episode of Voyager, but I certainly don't think this was the case for EF2. EF2 was simply a case of going to a level, shooting things, finding out information (which was always presented to you automatically when you completed a level) and then you moved onto another location. There were no real twists and the entire plot was easily figured out after a few levels. For me, this meant I started to lose interest in the game probably around halfway through when it was obvious what was going on. This is a shame, but the story is an important part of keeping you coming back to a game such as this, and I thought it failed.

There are multiplayer aspects, but I never got hooked on the original Elite Force multiplayer games, so I never even bothered with the EF2 ones.

Overall, I'd say that this would be very enjoyable for Star Trek fans. Casual gamers and FPS fans might not find a lot here to tempt them into a "must buy", but if you can find it cheap enough these days (and there's no reason why you couldn't), it's a decent enough way to kill some time without being an outstanding example of the genre.

Recommended specifications:
DirectX 9 compatible 3D graphics card
Pentium or Athlon processor (600 MHz) or higher
Microsoft Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
128MB of RAM
DirectX 9 compatible sound card
DirectX 9

My own specifications (where different):
2.5 GHz CPU
1 GB RAM
Windows XP SP2

Summary: Shoot, shoot, shoot. Gather information. Shoot, shoot shoot. The End.