Star Trek: Voyager Elite Force Review

Star Trek: Voyager Elite Force is an outstanding first-person shooter based on the most recent Star Trek TV series. Star Trek fans shouldn't be alone in experiencing the game's exciting story-driven single-player campaign that pits the Voyager crew against Klingon scavengers, the Borg menace, and other sinister forces - as well as its solid multiplayer mode.

Elite Force is consistently action-packed, but nevertheless, it features a variety of settings that will challenge and impress even some of the most experienced first-person shooter enthusiasts. Best of all, these encounters are linked together seamlessly - in fact, there hasn't been a shooter with such a well-designed, albeit short, single-player mode since Opposing Force, Gearbox's great expansion to Valve Software's groundbreaking 1998 game, Half-Life. Comparing Half-Life and Opposing Force to Elite Force is an obvious gesture, mostly because the older games' influence is so evident in Elite Force's level design. Elite Force borrows Half-Life's convention of placing health and energy stations throughout the course of the game; and more significantly, the main character in Elite Force wears a special hazard suit much like the one that Half-Life protagonist Gordon Freeman wears. Just as in Valve's game, this hazard suit - standard issue for each member of Lieutenant Tuvok's special forces team in Elite Force - helps you suspend disbelief as it absorbs damage and reports health and ammunition ratings. It's the reason your enemies can't just kill you in one hit; meanwhile, your powerful energy weapons can literally disintegrate most of your foes on contact.

The arsenal in Elite Force consists of nine different good-looking, powerful weapons, each of which has two distinct modes of fire. The weapons range from the standard-issue Federation phaser and compression rifle to the devastating photon burst, whose explosive photon-torpedo-like attack can reduce your enemies to dust. All the weapons in Elite Force are high tech, and each produce bright, impressive effects, though the weapon models themselves don't look especially interesting. But the weapons sound good, and their alternate modes of fire either give them additional functionality (as with the grenade launcher, which can alternatively launch a sticky proximity mine) or more deadly attack modes that cost proportionally more energy or ammunition. Some veterans of first-person shooters - particularly fans of Raven Software's own Soldier of Fortune - might initially believe that the arsenal in Elite Force lacks weapons that have the same sort of satisfying impact as the shotguns and chainguns of classic shooters like Doom and Quake. Meanwhile, die-hard Star Trek fans may be reluctant to accept some of Elite Force's heavy-duty weapons as definitive Star Trek technology. In any case, on closer inspection, you'll certainly agree that the game's weapon designs are well designed - they each seem strong and useful, and yet all the guns are sufficiently elegant or alien that they do seem as if they're suitable to the Star Trek universe.

Some of the battles in Elite Force are particularly intense, because you're not the only one shooting the bad guys. Oftentimes you'll have one or more crewmates in tow, who will help you out in battle. In the interest of gameplay, they don't do too much of the real work, just as your enemies will be much more inclined to fire on you than at your squad. But these characters are surprisingly responsive, and they really give you the sense that you're not doing all the fighting by yourself. This is especially true when their special skills come into play in the game's many scripted sequences - you may have to provide cover for an engineer as he hacks into a heavily defended security system or complete a multitiered objective simultaneously with several crewmembers as you keep in contact via your communicators.

The crewmembers are a welcome asset in some of the game's large-scale battles. In one early sequence, you burst through a doorway to take part in a pitched gunfight that involves several of your crew and a host of Klingon foes who fire at each other from behind barricades. This is a memorable but not uncommon type of sequence in Elite Force - the game seems to use an ideal combination of scene scripting and artificial intelligence routines to create unique fights that play out differently on multiple trials. Elite Force even has several scenes in between the main combat missions in which you're aboard the Voyager to recuperate, rearm yourself, and discuss the situation with your crew. These parts of the game not only do a great job of modeling the deck of the Voyager, but also help make the game seem consistent and realistic, rather than merely like a series of shooter levels. Being able to chat with the Voyager's crew in between missions, either before a briefing or in the locker room, lends the game a personal touch.