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| By B.S. Walker |
Produced by Paramount and developed by Digital Extremes, STAR TREK: THE VIDEO GAME thrusts you aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise and into the role of either cocksure Captain Kirk or rational First Officer Spock as they’re locked in a desperate fight to get back some sort of Genesis-type device from re-imagined, old school favorites, the Gorn.
Unfortunately, the only thing you’ll be fighting desperately to do is stay awake in this unpolished and undercooked video game that needed another year in the developmental oven to reach its full potential.
In a storyline that takes place after the events of J.J. Abrams’ franchise reboot, but before the upcoming Into Darkness, the crew of the Enterprise is called back to active duty to help the now homeless Vulcans (courtesy of Eric Bana’s Nero dropping a black hole into the middle of their planet) rebuild and get on with their lives.
But Lizardmen have crashed the party and stolen off with a key component they intend to weaponize and do bad things with.
Now Kirk and Spock must work in tandem to stop the Gorn and save some hot Vulcan chick from certain doom.
Choosing Kirk as the anchor for my single-player experience, I found AI Spock to actually not be too dreadful. Sure, he would get hung up on objects and I’d have to nudge him out from behind a desk or ammo replenishing station, but it didn’t happen as often as I expected. Though his true low-point was in the initial encounter with a Gorn boss where he couldn’t help but become incapacitated ten seconds into the fight EVERY SINGLE TIME! which led to my repeated demise — until the Gorn finally glitched, standing unmoving in a doorway allowing me to unload on him at my own leisurely pace.
And therein lies the problem, the game feels flat out unfinished.
Environments lack any sort of detail or character. Exploration is virtually non-existent, save for finding communicators (that contain audio logs) and scanning various items to accumulate points that can be used to bolster your tricorder and phaser, unlocking special perks for each.
But the real dagger is Enemy AI that is painfully inadequate.
Leading to rinse and repeat gunfights where you can usually not even bother with cover and just charge in phasers blazing since there’s a 50/50 chance the enemies won’t even notice you’re five feet away with a pistol pointed at their noodle until you pump a few rounds into their face.
On the upside, there is at least some variety to break up the monotonous gameplay with segments where you take control of the Enterprise’s weapons to bring down a Gorn fleet or use a flying squirrel suit to infiltrate a cavernous outpost. Sadly, these bits are all too brief. Though one manages to stand out…
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it also happens to be the best level in the entire game. Armed with teleporter guns (think Portal), you and your partner beam one another across a grid of platforms to meet your objectives. It’s fairly linear, while managing to be refreshing at the same time. And if anything, it shows what could have been.
Maybe I was wrong to hope for a Mass Effect 3 clone featuring the Star Trek Universe. But if this game had even a quarter of that game’s charm and polish it would have been more than passable.
Instead we’re stuck with mediocre at its very best.
Skip it and go back to playing Bioshock Infinite.
