Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force & Expansion Pack

by ActiVision

Product Details

• ASIN: B000HA2AKG
• Media: CD-ROM
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #38,618 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)

Product Description

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Still a great game, September 5, 2006

By 

Rottenberg's rotten book review (nyc) - See all my reviews

= Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force & Expansion Pack (CD-ROM)

This 1st-person-shooter game has you taking on the role of Alexander Munro (or the lovely Alexandra) an ensign aboard Star Trek's USS Voyager and part of the "Hazard Team" that must defend everybody else against hostile aliens. Armed with a variety of weapons and trained to operate equipment on any alien starship, the team stands ready against whatever the Delta Quadrant can throw at it. Unfortunately, Munro is a bit too impulsive and stands to be kicked off the team. Instead, fate intervenes and the team is forced to take Munro along when the ship is snared by an alien ship and brought through an "iso-dimensional" rift into a vast graveyard of other alien ships. With Voyager too severely damaged and drained of power to escape, the Hazard Team is pressed into duty - boarding other ships in a desperate attempt to learn the secret of the aliens that hijacked their ship, and to find the means to escape. The game relies on both alien races both familiar (Klingon, Malon, Hirogen and Borg) and new. The levels aren't too long or complicated, and a tight storyline beautifully keeps the game running. Between the missions is a mix of cut-scenes (using the game engine, ala JK2) and interactive scenes in which you prowl the halls and lounges of the Voyager and mingle with its crew.

There's a lot to love and to be disappointed with in this game, which is nevertheless the king of Trek games. Level design is a mixed bag of great and bad - with my clear favorite being the Scavenger ship, a huge space station composed of salvaged starships like a Klingon Warbird and an early 23rd century Constitution class starship (that level excels because it's such a mishmash that you never know what you're going to see next). The game wisely starts its action aboard an Etherian starship, whose wondrous insides resemble less that of a space-going vessel than an acid trip. Unfortunately, those are the early levels. The game maintains its edge with an infiltration mission on a Borg cube, only to lose it afterwards, when you find you must infiltrate other alien ships manned by either sentry robots or the harvesters and reavers - vicious and robot-like aliens. The game also has a wonderful design engine that gives some of its non-player characters a wonderful individuality (whether it's your team mates or the aliens). However, that tool, embedded within the "Icarus" engine, is barely relied on for the hostile aliens - and most of the aliens you'll meet are faceless and uninteresting hordes. (The exception being that set aboard the Scavenger ship - where we hear Klingons complaining about their food, Hirogen discussing their latest hunts and humans playing an unending game of 3-D chess). Gameplay is hampered at all levels by the game's simplicity - much of EF has you prowling the hostile corridors of enemy territory, pretty much blasting whoever you meet, and finding the exit. (Again, the Scavenger level is best because it's a stealth mission, requiring extra precision; even so, you spend so much time hiding, that you can't afford more than quick glimpses of the scenery). The designers probably felt like they could only make a game that was either a fragfest or a thinking man's RPG, and that we'd be grateful whenever it was both, for even a second.

The "Expansion Pack" adds little to the game itself - some interesting single-player missions in a holodeck, and a scavenger-hunt that allows you to search the corridors of the Voyager (this expands on EF which also allowed you to peruse the decks of the Voyager - but the base game only allowed you access to a few decks at a time, and only those specific to that part of the game; here you can go pretty much anywhere). The holodeck missions are cool, but pointless - they don't affect anything else in the game or expansion pack. Yet the maps used for those missions are gorgeous - a "Captain Proton" map, and one set inside a Klingon base boasting some of the best atmospherics of any "QuakeIII" game.

I played this on my P4 (2Ghz) XP machine without any hick-ups. A basic 64mb graphics card was sufficient to get smooth performance (why not, the game is year's old!!) I drag this game out of the dustbin now and then and find it irresistible fun - a genuine classic as much fun today as when it first debuted.