Yes, Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force (STV:EF) is another Star Trek (ST) game, but the famed curse that seems to allow even the most promising ST video game to snatch mediocrity from the jaws of excellence has no place here. STV:EF is, paradoxically enough, one of the best ST games of all time, if not the best ST game of all time. This seems a paradox to me insofar as Star Trek: Voyager was not exactly what I would call a standout among the ST series.
The visuals in STV:EF are fabulous. The game is powered by the Quake III Arena (Q3A) engine, so this should come as no surprise. What amazes me most, however, is that STV:EF has the most detailed texturing work I have ever seen in a game. Plenty of other Q3A-powered titles look good, but almost everything in STV:EF maintains sharp, good-looking textures even under the closest of examination through a sniper scope. That's rare indeed.
Where this really pays off is in the Borg-related portion of the game. The initial levels walking through a Borg ship are utterly nail-biting. Seriously, this game had me on the edge of my seat at times, because the Borg are easily the most fearsome thing to me in the entire ST pantheon. The attention to detail is simply overwhelming, from the pencil-thin, red beams emitted by Borg eye-pieces to the transporter effects.
The modeling is first rate. The animation sequences are as fluid as anything I've seen in a video game. The special effects are absolutely beautiful. Everything just looks great. The ability of the Q3A engine to render curved surfaces is particularly noteworthy insofar as the game finally does justice to the ST vision. When exploring an alien ship, for example, it really feels alien. The very organic curves and details truly convey a sense of other-ness that previous games have failed to deliver.
The only complaint I can level against STV:EF in the visual department lies with some of the pre-rendered cinematics. To be more specific, they look kind of "chunky" sometimes. I know that video playback needs a lot of system horsepower, and maybe I'm being unrealistic given that I run the game at 1280 x 1024 x 32 bpp. I just can't help thinking that maybe it's time developers start using higher-quality cinematics in their games, or perhaps providing these separately for the gamer who really has the hardware to make them work.
The audio in STV:EF is almost as perfect as the visuals. All of the Paramount-approved sounds have been lifted right from the TV show, so fans of the series will be immediately right at home. The voice acting, with one exception, is uniformly well done by all of the familiar voices. The one exception, of course, is the use of someone other than Jeri Ryan to provide the voice for the original Borg babe herself, 7 of 9. The stand-in does a decent job, but, as with any woman as yummy as Ms. Ryan, only the genuine article will do.
| NB: |
The latest patch includes all-new voice work from the genuine article, so this problem has been fixed. Way to go, Raven! |
The music is also deserving of praise, as the soundtrack provides the typical, orchestral experience without seeming too canned. Seriously, the variety is sufficient that I'm largely not bothered by the music throughout the game, and that's unusual for me. The composer hit his marks rather nicely with everything from the opening soundtrack to the final credits. That's saying a lot.
The only entirely unaddressed complaint I have in the audio department involves the use of positional audio. I've had to make this complaint a lot about Q3A-powered games, so maybe there is something not-quite-right with the engine. Alternately, perhaps it's time I got my ears checked. I don't know. What I do know is that positional audio in games powered by the Unreal Tournament (UT), or other, engines, seems much more sharply delineated. The spatial cues just don't seem to have the same force with the Q3A engine for whatever reason.
The interface for STV:EF is an LCARS work of art. Ok, I just demonstrated my own geek-quotient with that remark, so I had best explain for the non Trekkie. LCARS is an acronym, short for Library Computer Access and Retrieval System, introduced by the Star Trek: The Next Generation series. It is essentially the operating system used by computers in the STV:EF era, and it has a very distinctive visual style associated with it. All of the STV:EF interface is perfectly themed in accordance with it, which makes it a joy for any ST fan to use.
The in-game heads-up display (HUD) is pretty standard fare for a first-person shooter (FPS) game, displaying clearly the amount of "armor" and health available, the ammunition type and amount remaining for the current weapon and so forth. Mapping controls, configuring the mouse and all other such details are everything gamers have come to expect from a Q3A-powered game. In short, it all works, and it all works well.
The game mechanics, while simplistic, are flawless. Walking, running, gunning, interacting with objects in the world, and pretty much everything else in the game is as good as can be expected. I would personally prefer to have some additional help from the HUD in the stealth-oriented sections of the game—more on those in a bit—but I suppose that can be overlooked as they are few and far between.
The story is typically interesting, if somewhat overwrought, ST fare. I say it's overwrought because, as is often the case, the writer felt the need to try to incorporate as many bits of ST lore as possible in the game. It's almost as if developers working on a ST game think that they bear the burden of giving the fans the entire ST universe—you know, just in case their game sucks so badly it's the last ST game ever developed (grin).
On a more serious note, however, the ship-gets-captured-by-radically-advanced-alien-intelligence theme is growing a bit stale, is it not? That is what got Voyager lost in the delta quadrant to begin with, after all, so it's an odd bit of plot overuse that takes Voyager into the graveyard in STV:EF. Maybe Voyager is simply the unluckiest Federation ship in existence, or maybe Captain Janeway is simply irresistible to aliens, which might explain her relative lack of appeal for male Homo-Sapiens. I don't know.
The one element of the story that is utterly baffling, and largely silly I think, is the final boss. Virtually no explanation is provided for his existence, there isn't any clear plot line to make sense of his presence, etc. As such, by the time the story's climax arrives, one can't help the feeling that it's less of a climax and more of a lame insert-obligatory-end-boss-here plot device.
If I didn't say that STV:EF was a bit light in terms of playing time, then I would likely be the only reviewer not to mention it. Seriously, almost every review I read of the game said the same thing, namely, it's too short. In all honesty, I have to agree, but that agreement needs to be qualified somewhat. Making an FPS game is a balancing act all the way around, and nowhere is that more apparent, I think, than in its length. If it's too short, then the player feels cheated, but if it's too long, the player can get bored and feel like reaching the end is more labor than fun. STV:EF clearly falls into the former camp, but the content is of such a high quality that the player doesn't feel quite so cheated.
Overall, one gets to walk through the familiar Voyager decks, creep cautiously through a Borg cube, explore a seriously bizarre alien ship, travel through a most schizophrenic amalgam of ships in the graveyard, and so forth. The inclusion of the alternate universe from the original ST series episode #39, "Mirror, Mirror" (see, I told you I was a geek!) was a particularly interesting bit, as it allows the player to go skulking through some of the faithfully recreated sets from the original series. The environments were interesting and somewhat varied, though still more would not have hurt.
The stealth portions of the game, particularly the early one involving the exploring of a Klingon vessel in search of special items, were a bit tedious to me. I like stealth as a gameplay device, having happily completed both Thief and Thief II, but it just wasn't as much fun in STV:EF. The one thing that keeps me from making this a full-blown complaint is that Raven really did it right. That is, if you're discovered, the game doesn't end immediately in utter failure; rather, lots of bad guys show up! That was the one saving grace of the stealth sequences, namely, that I could still get myself out of the mess.
Despite all the goodies, there remain some problems worth mentioning. First, the player doesn't get to explore enough of Voyager! It's clear that Raven went to a great deal of effort to be technically accurate with the ship's layout. Why not let the player explore? Perhaps this will be addressed in the forthcoming expansion pack. Enjoyable as it was to wander through small bits of Voyager, it would have been a ST fan's dream to wander through the entire ship. It strikes me as a missed opportunity, though it's ultimately a small complaint.
A more substantive concern is with the game's AI. To be more specific, the AI for one's hazard team colleagues is relatively poor. They do move well enough, though always unhurried it seems, but they're almost useless in a firefight. I realize that the game designers wanted to make sure that the player was the one driving the action, but it sure wouldn't have hurt my feelings to have a bit more help at various points! It certainly would have helped them seem more like real crewmen, rather than straining the illusion. As it was, I found it hard to believe that those jokers, who fire only once every few seconds at most, were part of a hazard team!
Third, there are some odd stability issues with the game. I don't know if this is the result of my motherboard having a VIA chipset, or something else, but various points in the game were absolutely fatal. To be more specific, the problem happened only with in-game cut-scenes, and only in certain spots. When the problem occurred, however, the visual display would freeze while some bit of audio would continuously loop in the background. The only way to stop it was to hit the computer's reset switch. The solution, which took me far too long to find, was to scale back the hardware acceleration under my system's audio settings. I've seen this kind of problem before with the Q3A engine, but it was particularly pronounced in STV:EF.
Fourth and finally, the end boss was just lame. I'm not opposed to bosses in general, but I am opposed to end bosses that don't make sense and/or are practically unbeatable. I never did figure out why the ultimate bad guy turned out to be some overgrown alien slug with a predilection for ranting on annoyingly—in English, no less. He just made no sense in terms of the game's story. Worse, he was practically unbeatable. The player is forced to face him with very little available cover, and yet his attacks can kill with a single, direct hit.
Worse, the player is forced to replenish ammunition (and probably health) in the middle of the fight at least once, which makes him a sitting duck. I found the final encounter to be more frustrating than rewarding, and after a few dozen, failed attempts to take down the boss, I used the cheat codes to get past it. Encounters like that one really make me wonder: do game developers think hitting the reload button is fun?
The multi-player aspect of the game is a sore spot with me for two reasons. First, the ninnies in control of the ST license presumably insisted that nobody get hurt because, after all, we're all so terribly enlightened in the 23rd century that nobody would ever want to hurt anybody else. Right. Sure thing. Was it just me, or was Kirk kicking somebody's ass every other week? What I refer to, of course, is the emphasis on holomatch and not deathmatch. As well done as it is, and believe me Raven has done it very well, there's just something missing when your opponent de-rezzes rather than getting gibbed. A photon launcher should gib people, folks, not make them fizzle out in a puff of holo-stuff. It detracts from the visceral impact of the game.
Second, there are too few people playing! I really don't get this either. STV:EF should be a crossover hit with the general gaming public, but there are never that many people playing on-line. Whereas I can find thousands and thousands of Counterstrike servers, for example, I can't find even two-hundred STV:EF servers, and most of those are either empty or have ping times approaching the time it took to write this review. That's sad.
STV:EF could provide an utterly amazing multi-player experience were it not for these two things. Still, it's a lot of fun when you can get a good game going. Just don't count on hundreds of hours of multi-player, on-line replay value, as I doubt you're going to get that much out of it.
STV:EF is a great game, despite the flaws I've mentioned. I wouldn't recommend paying full price for it because of its length, but if it can be found for, say, the $29.99 I paid for it on sale at Best Buy, then it's a no-brainer. The game is a must for any serious to lukewarm fan of ST, and it's good enough that I can recommend it to just about any FPS gamer. Here's hoping that a sequel is in the making somewhere!
12/29/2000