Customer Reviews

Star Trek: Shattered Universe

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Well, I read the user reviews and went ahead and got the game anyway, and I'm glad that I did!

This game is a fun shooter with a great Star Trek story around it. It starts out with an accident that sends your ship, with Capt. Sulu at the helm, into the mirror universe (introduced in the episode where Spock had a goatee.) The rest of the game is basically about your efforts to get back to the "normal" universe. Right off the bat, the one good thing about this setting is that you get to go up against all the federation ships, since the federation is your enemy in the mirror universe! You ultimately have to make friends with the Klingons and the Romulans who'll in turn help you to get back to the "normal" universe. The story includes a lot of references to the original series, so I really enjoyed it.

As for the graphics, all the ships in the game look exactly like I remember them from the show and the scale is dead-on accurate. The backgrounds are nicely done, not just dull black space, but a lot of nebula's, planets, and stars to add to the whole feel of the game. As for sound, the music is OK, but what I really liked was playing the game on my surround-sound system. It's great to hear photon torpedoes coming at you from behind!

Where the game falters a bit is in the physics, which are very rudimentary (you pretty much just bounce of other ships) but for me it didn't distract much from the game. The controls are also standard space-combat fare.

I bought this game thinking it was a capital ship type combat game. Instead it is a shuttle combat game. The missions are extremely tedious and HARD even on easy. I got really frustrated with the difficulty of the game and the repetion. The only decent feature is the graphics, which is why it gets two stars overall. I do not recommend buying this game, even if you are a Star Trek Fan.

Why is it so hard to produce a good, quality, well thought-out Star Trek game? Not since Birth of a Federation has there been a really good ST game.

The game showed much promise, especially since we would finally get to see some of Captain Sulu in action (without a bloated Kirk interfering). I really enjoyed the animations of Sulu and Chekov. They are really well done.

With that said, the rest of the game is pretty bland. As mentioned by one of the other reviewers, space is primarily black! What is up with all the colorful nebulas? It greatly detracts from game play and makes it really hard to fight the enemy ships. Yes, the game designers got to show their artistic side... great... but that is not why I play the game!

And as for the fighters, I would think that 24th century fighters would have better targeting systems than that of WWII aircraft. Yes, you can lock on to a target and keep track of it, but no, your weapon systems are not smart enough to do the same. Dont think so, folks!

I would have really enjoyed a chance to get at the helm and weapons of the Excelsior. Such a grand ship would have had a field day on those pesky fighters...

I'm afraid this one is just a rental. Sorry. Please keep trying guys! I want a really good ST game. PLEASE!!!!!

Finally I thought they would make a Star Trek game good. But nooooooo, they have to make it one of the hardest games I've played in a while. First of all let me say that the one star is for the graphics. They did a great job bringing the ships to life but thats where the fun stops. Do the people that make these games ever try to play test them. Come on!!! All the computer ships do is fire straight at you until you hit them or until they pass you. There is no skill on their part. And how about 10 enemies vs 1 little ship...BOOM! I do have to say that fighting the big ships is fun, at least once you figure out their blind spot. Why can't they make a Star Trek flight sim fun instead of fighting for 30 minutes just to die at the very end or have the Ecselsior blow up and have to start all over. Save your money or rent it and make your own conclusions.

Unfortunately, that's about it. It would've been a much more interesting game if they had let you pilot capital ships along with the fighters, kind of like in "Secret Weapons Over Normandy". I for one love fighter combat, but even this game gets old, especially when there seems to be no end in sight to the enemy fighter waves, and your command ship cannot defend itself at all (which is why a human behind the guns of the Excelsior would greatly improve your chances of completing a mission). Also, skilled AI pilots would've made the game much more challenging. It seems the designers subscribe to the Empire's theory in Star Wars: Quantity over quality. Sure, it's great to have lots of enemies to shoot at, since there's less chance of you missing, but they all fly the same way, and pretty poorly for that matter (especially since you can usually outwit enemy squadrons by hiding behind planetary bodies--they make no effort to fly around them and simply burn up in the atmosphere). The only reason why they would win in a dogfight is because it's so blasted hard to effectively aim your weapons at their ships. Not even the Kobayashi Maru difficulty setting improves AI piloting skills; it only makes your craft much more vulnerable to damage and prohibits your shields from recharging. One of my biggest gripes about the game is the fact that whenever a ship explodes or warps in or out during combat the game suddenly switches to cinematic mode, and you have no way of knowing where your ship is and could easily fly into another ship or even a planet. It would've been nice at least for your ship to be invulnerable during these scenes. Finally, the character animation looks simply ridiculous. Have these guys ever heard of motion capture? This animation is something that would look good on the super NES system 10 years ago. All in all, a good game for mindless shooting, but unfortunately another disappointing ST game. I bought this game and Dominion Wars for name value and cover art, and both severely disappointed me.

It's rare I find a game which makes me run screaming from the room. Shattered Universe is one of those. My quick thoughts:

The good: decent voice acting from the actors who made Sulu and Chevokv famous; set in the Star Trek universe.
The bad: Game play is repetitive and boring after just a few missions.
The ugly: The game is just too damm hard on some missions. The aiming controls don't work well, and when you are trying to save the dead in the water Excelsior from 2 capital ships and 10 or so bombers, it's not worth wasting your time.

BOTTOM LINE: Beam this piece of garbage into space Scotty!!

This game look promising but it had some fatal flaws. There were no training level. The control is too complicated to figure out. The action sequences get very repetitive after awhile. This game resemble the first target shooting game of Interplay's Starfleet Academy - Starfleet Command. Unless you are a die hard gamer, this game is not for the average game player.

SPOILERS

I nearly peed my pants when I saw this game sitting on the shelf in the store. I couldn't believe it: A Star Trek flyer!

I've been a fan of the Colony Wars games pretty much since they came out, and I was surprised at how similar the engine was in this game. The effects of environment added a fun twist to the handling of the vessels (stormy nebulas and star clusters).

The ships are all beautifully rendered, as well as the various space phenomena encountered throughout the game. Who wants to play against BLACK throughout an entire game? The most exciting aspect of the game was finally being able to take on those capitals I watched on the TV show. It was like living out a childhood fantasy! The selection of ships is diverse and upgradeable, and the Romulan Shrike even has a cloaking ability!

It was very fun to be able to go back and take on nemeses from the original series: the M-5 computer, the Doomsday Machine, even that big germ from "The Immunity Syndrome"!

Flak and capital accuracy keep you on your toes: slow down or cease evasive maneuvers, and you're space dust!

This is a fun game to play, but minor details tend to bring the overall experience down.

The weapons lock system is confusing and erratic: when an enemy vessel is destroyed, next lock seems to be randomly based. Cycling between targets was a pain: "NEAREST RETICLE! NEAREST MY RETICLE! AAARGH!"

Stop! Stop! Why can't I hold in one place? AGH!

While I enjoyed the challenge, the game was impossibly hard in parts. Early in the game, I had to set it to easy just to get past the fourth mission.

Control setup was difficult. I could have easily remedied what problems I had with the setup, were it not for the limited selection of controller presets.

During in-game cinematics, it certainly would have been courteous to add some kind of protection for the player's vessel. For example, when a capital ship is breaching, the POV switches from cockpit/3rd to the exploding ship. However, the player is still in control of the fighter. The vulnerable ship will continue to move, and the player has no idea where it's going! What is to prevent one from flying straight into the firing range of a group of enemy capitals? Removing the ship from combat temporarily or "cinematic invincibility" or even doing away with the unnecessarily long camera switch would make gameplay a little more fair.

I loved how the designers put Sulu and Chekov into the starring roles this time around. But even these two had a hard time brightening up the script (How many times does Sulu say, "With a little luck, ... "?). Cinematic quality was greatly underwhelming, if not disappointing. If other games have near life-like motions inside game play, why do the interludes look like something that came from the middle ages of PS1?

Overall, it was a fun game to play! But the cinematic quality and other small details diminish what could have been a great game.

I thoroughly enjoyed this game and on the easy setting it isn't all that difficult. It also offers something different then the other Star Trek games. Instead of flying a big lumbering slow starship you are in a fighter, a more rapid paced game! Plenty of episodes in this with good graphics of old star trek nemesis's that I won't reveal here. I have played nearly every Star Trek game that has come out and almost everyone seems to get bad reviews, it just seems thats the fashion now days. Yes I liked Star Trek Legacy too, though it did have some flaws it was still fun. If you like Star Trek you will like this game, if you don't you might still get some enjoyment out of it, but I think some serious effort went into it. Not at all deserving of the one star reviews etc.

At first I was a little apprehensive of this game. As far as I was aware fighter-style combat is not something that there is a lot of in Star Trek.
However, after giving this game a fair hearing I was pleasantly surprised. The first thing that grabbed my attention was the graphics which are very crisp and clean for a Playstation game, and there is very little sign of the pixelisation normally encountered. The ships look great, especially the capital class ships, which look fantastic and authentically styled (especially the Original Series Constitution ships, they are damn perfect!). The story line, though featuring a few poor character animations is compelling, edgy and very true to the canon of Star Trek, especially the nods to the orginal series of which there are many. Both of the celebrity voice actors (Geogre Takai and Walter Keonig) reprise their roles as Sulu and Chekov well, and really add atmoshere to the plot.
As for the game itself, the learning curve is admittedly steep (I was rather shocked when I had to take on 4 Federation Battlecruisers virtually single handedly in my fighter!) but thanks to a well designed combat system it is up to the player to discover the tactics necessary to defeat your adversaries, including the phaser blind spots on capital ship and the correct weapons to use. All the major races' craft are featured, and all in all it is a fine game, well designed and balanced.
The only bad point as far as I'm concerned is the repetition of a couple of the mission types, but as I enjoyed it so much I am happy enough to brush over what seems to be a bit of padding in the mission structure. As there are relatively few space flight combat games on the PS2 I think that this a good example of the genre.
At least its easier than Blast Radius on the PSX!