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• Reviewed on: WIndows XP
• Also available for: WIndows 98 through XP Professional
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• The Good: Graphics are generally quite good; nice selection of weapons; some good monsters.
• The Bad: Characters appear blocky even on high settings; some missions are extremely boring.
• The Verdict: This game has its moments, but overall it's probably mainly for the die-hard Star Trek fan.
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REVIEW:

If you're a science fiction fan, chances are you've enjoyed one of the Star Trek TV shows and/or movies — either the original show with Captain Kirk and Spock, the later incarnation with Jean-Luc Picard and Data, or the more recent spinoffs. So how cool would it be to play a first-person shooter game based on those TV shows and movies, where you're killing bad guys on the deck of the Starship Enterprise and taking orders from Captain Picard? Well, that depends.

If you're a die-hard fan, the chance to wander around a starship may make up for some of the weaker points of Star Trek Elite Force II — or it may not.

In some ways, this game from Ritual Entertainment (a sequel to Raven Software's Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force) is an excellent shooter, and some of that is due to the fact that it uses the legendary Quake III engine from Id software, which is the basis for some of the best FPS games out there.

The graphics are also quite good, particularly when it comes to the surroundings, which are well rendered and in some cases quite spooky, with good fog generation and some other-worldly trees and buildings. In many ways, the surroundings are similar to those in Unreal II, with alien vegetation that seems almost alive and some interesting creatures.

In some cases, the characters themselves are somewhat less well done, however. Up close, the seams of the 3D models are obvious, and there are disconcerting moments where a character opens his or her mouth and you see part of the floor or the wall through it, which is sloppy code writing. There is also a blocky shape to things — even on the highest detail level — that leaves a little to be desired, although the ships and other hardware are quite good.

When it comes to the bad guys, there are some creatures that show promise, but others are quite pedestrian. The Exomorphs — a bio-engineered race of greenish creatures that explode into yellowish ooze when you shoot them — are fairly humdrum, although the way they dissolve after they die is kind of cool. There are also larger monsters with massive jaws and gargantuan quadrupeds with huge heads that can send you flying if they hit you, but even they are fairly easy to deal with once you get used to them appearing.

There are bat-like beings that hang from the roof in the fog and shoot rays of energy, and there are giant spiders as well, of course - something that seems obligatory in space-based games. They can both be nasty, but like the other monsters they follow strict patterns. In other words, the artificial intelligence isn't all that elaborate, so they are easily outwitted.

Unfortunately, this goes for many of the human foes as well — or the sort-of-human ones, such as the Borg. You meet the Borg in the early levels of the game, and like much of Elite Force II, the realism (or whatever you want to call it) is quite convincing. They look and sound pretty much like the Borg from the TV show. As captain of the "hazard team," you and your team members — one blue guy, one Vulcan, one Asian scientific type and one attractive humanoid female — have to deal with them, rescue a team member, etc.

Even allowing for the fact that the Borg are supposed to be robots, however — or part robot — they are fairly unimpressive when it comes to reacting to their surroundings. Getting past them or deactivating them is a fairly simple matter once you realize that you can just blow up their central nervous system, and the way to do this becomes obvious relatively quickly. Then it's just a matter of repeating the same types of manoeuvres over and over.

With a few exceptions, this goes for most levels. The surroundings are well done, and the weapons you get to shoot are well rendered, with a nice variety of shots — laser guns, rifles that shoot energy bolts, a grenade launcher, an arc gun (similar to Quake's lightning gun), and so on. But the enemies are relatively stupid, and apart from sheer numbers there isn't much of a challenge to them for the most part. Health and power charging stations are also readily available, which keeps you from running out of either one too frequently.

One of the other things that might get in the way for some fans of the all-out shooting game is that after several action levels you get an "information gathering mission," in which you have no weapons at all, just your tricorder. You are aboard the Enterprise, or in one case at Starfleet Command, and your job is to wander around and talk to people — either Captain Picard, or one of your team members, or some alien scientist. Sometimes your Vulcan friend gives you a new weapon to try out in the Holodeck, which is mildly amusing.

Unfortunately, however, most of these missions are boring with a capital "B." Even when you have to go to the Enterprise's guest quarters to interview a busty alien scientist — who, in time-honoured Star Trek fashion, is wearing nothing but a bikini that appears to be made out of leather and fur — it just isn't that interesting. This is where it really helps to be an all-out Trek fanatic, because only then will wandering around the various decks and Jeffries tubes of the Enterprise be enough of a thrill to keep you from nodding off.

Also right off the boring scale are some of the tasks you have to perform in the middle of a mission, especially the periodic points at which you have to adjust some electronic device using your tricorder. Once again, the thrill of simply holding a Star Trek tricorder and using it on something will have to be enough for you, because the little mini-games that pop up when you do so — which look a lot like the old PC game Pipes, where you rotate different sections of pipe to make a connection — are tedious in the extreme.

Some parts of this game are well done, and it is not unpleasant to look at or to play overall. But at the same time, there are some flaws that only a true Star Trek fan will be able to overlook.