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Genre: First-person shooter

Format: CD

Developer: Ritual Entertainment

Mac Publisher: Aspyr Media

Minimum System Requirements: 733MHz G3, Mac OS X v10.1.5, 256MB RAM, 16MB 3D graphics acceleration(ATI Radeon/NVidia GeForce or better), 1.05GB free hard disk space

Review Computer: 1GHz Powerbook G4 12" 256MB RAM, 32MB GeForce FX Go 5200, and Mac OS X v10.3.3

Network Feature: No

3D Support: Required

Price: $39.99

ESRB Rating: T for Teen

Availability: Now

Official Website: [url=http://www.st-ef2.com]http://www.st-ef2.com[/url]

To begin: I've never been a tremendous Star Trek fan. Watched a few episodes of The Next Generation with my old man back in the day, but that was about it. I was more of a Star Wars guy, personally—something about the lightsabers, force powers, and lack of dorky spandex uniforms kind of appealed to me, I guess. When I thought Star Trek, I thought about slow-paced action ("Draw...phasers. Arm...phasers. Set phasers to...stun. Shoot...phasers."), Whoopi Goldberg (whom I had only known previously from Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit), and an old family friend who had managed to teach his seven-year-old son something approximating high school physics through the explanation of such Star Trek fixtures as the warp drive. Given these kind of associations, I don't think it's any small wonder that my pre-adolescent geek brain opted for Star Wars.

You can imagine, then, that it was with not a little bit of reluctance that I volunteered to review Star Trek: Elite Force II. If the above wasn't enough, my last experience with Star Trek was the craptacular Klingon Honor Guard. The Star Wars fan in me was probably crying silent tears, but geekdom allegiances don't pay the bills, so I signed up.

I've been pleasantly surprised, to say the least.

Star Trek: Elite Force II does a fantastic job of taking the Star Trek vibe and paring it down to fit into the confines of a first-person shooter computer game. Like most first-person shooters, Elite Force II is straightforward and very much to the point; the pace of the game is closer to a Hollywood action movie than the TV-episodic space opera that the Star Trek series was developed into. The action starts, like the original Elite Force, with Alex Munro fighting against the trademark Star Trek villains, the Borg. Entitled Endgame, this chapter serves to introduce the main characters of Voyager's Hazard Team—your squad of teammates who get the missions too dirty for the rest of Starfleet to handle—in the heat of battle. Which, for a first-person shooter, is absolutely perfect. It's as if they took a page from a Bond movie, or a Lethal Weapon movie, or something. From here, the Hazard Team has to deal with insect-like aliens (isn't this kind of cliché by now? Alien, StarCraft, Starship Troopers, the list goes on...), manipulation and betrayal by other alien races, and all sorts of neat plot twists.

Elite Force II's story progresses by chapters, each composed of a couple of sub-missions oriented around reaching some overarching goal. Endgame, for example, requires the Hazard Team to disable a field generator in the Borg sphere so Voyager can break free and escape; however, the Hazard Team was warped in several different locations at the beginning of the mission, so the first few tasks require you to reunite your party and destroy specific targets in the Borg sphere before you can free Voyager. Admittedly, this isn't quite as detailed as, say, the missions involved in games like Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear, nor is it as involved and flexible as those of Deus Ex. If anything, it's closest to Marathon's missions; it's a little more complicated than find-the-red-key-behind-the-blue-door, but not much more.

Which is, I suppose, the point; this kind of mission fits in perfectly with the action movie narrative pace. Rather than create incredibly deep, open-ended, epic missions, Elite Force II gives you a few very simple goals and throws a few challenges at you along the way, reminding you that you're having fun playing the game, not necessarily saving the free world every five minutes. Elite Force II's missions aren't the most intricate ever; you'll remember them for the little things that go wrong in each mission. The Mission Impossible movie wasn't fun just because we really wanted to see Tom Cruise find the bad guy, it was fun because of all the little things he had to do on the way, like dangle from harnesses for 15 minutes. Likewise, Elite Force II's missions are peppered with detours; an airlock might blow up on your way to restore power to a defense grid, forcing you to find the emergency shield computer within 30 seconds or die from asphyxiation. Because of this, the abundance of plot twists and cameo appearances involving established Star Trek races (the latter of which makes Elite Force II feel like Star Trek on a college brochure or something) is somewhat forgivable; while there are several plot holes, it's okay, because Elite Force II's gameplay is good enough to compensate for them.

However, some of the detours yielded by Elite Force II's comprise one of my major misgivings. While the action-based sequences, even the timed ones, are genuinely enjoyable (saving Chang from assimilation, for example), certain side objectives that involve the tricorder (think Star Trek PalmPilot) are nothing but annoying. While the inclusion of the tricorder generally adds an extra dimension to the game—it lets you scan for weak walls that lead to secret areas, for example, as well as interact with doors, analyze objects, and other miscellaneous tasks—certain broken starship apparatus requires you to fix it with the tricorder, either by playing with the amplitude, frequency and offset of a wave in order to match an ideal, or configure electricity conduits to reroute power somewhere. I'm sure someone out there appreciates the attention to detail, but seriously, I play Elite Force II to shoot stuff, not play a game of MacPipes under a time limit with my life at stake.

Interspersed among the individual chapters are story-driven action breaks, usually set in your base starship, but at least one occurs at the visually breathtaking Starfleet Academy in San Francisco. While these were most likely thrown in so the Trekkies out there could live out their dream of walking through the Enterprise or harassing professors at the Academy, their inclusion manages to flesh out the world of Elite Force II nicely. They're not unnecessarily long, in case you're not in the mood—you can run through and do what needs to be done pretty quickly—but if you feel like dawdling, you'll begin to notice the astonishing level of detail that Ritual paid to the Star Trek universe. Eavesdropping upon random conversations can yield an in depth discussion between a professor and his students of different warp drive theories vis-a-vis an upcoming test, or the nature of a certain hostile man-eating plant, or maybe some gossip about the newest addition, the hardcore Hazard Team. Besides being simply impressive, the little tidbits that Ritual included let you truly immerse yourself in the game if you choose to. You don't have to, to enjoy it, but the option is there.

Along similar lines, Elite Force II includes a rather bizarre sub-game; in order to reward level discovery, perhaps, golden starships are hidden across almost all the levels. These can usually be found by taking your time in certain levels, especially by scanning walls with the tricorder for unstable architecture. These can in turn be used to unlock bonus levels—the two I've unlocked so far have put me in a swamp cabin with a bunch of enemies, and a bombed-out city with a rocket launcher and a bunch of alien patrol ships. Um, okay. Not a bad idea, but something that seems to fit a bit closer with, say, Super Mario 64 than any first-person shooter. If it's not quite your thing, feel free to ignore them completely and just edit your config file to unlock the levels.

Elite Force II's graphics are fairly demanding on a modern machine, but not too unforgiving—my 1GHz G4 has a hard time with complicated fight scenes, and that's most likely because I've only got the minimum RAM requirement (256MB). However, this is slightly compensated for by the absolute visual excellence achieved by Elite Force II. As far as I can tell, Elite Force II manages to reproduce familiar Star Trek environments perfectly; even those which aren't depicted in the series itself feel very much like a plausible extension of Star Trek. Beyond accuracy, though, the attention to visual detail and design can be appreciated by people who have no particular interest in Star Trek, too. The visuals also function as a necessary part of Elite Force II's atmosphere; rather than just showing off good graphics for the sake of good graphics, Elite Force II's levels are designed in a manner that ties the level's vibe very closely to its aesthetics. While the game is playable at lower detail levels, and there are plenty of tweakable options for lower-end computers, it really needs a newer computer to be fully appreciated. The sound effects are somewhat less impressive; the voice acting is there but not particularly remarkable, the music is above average but not particularly stirring. The only exceptional part of Elite Force II's sound set is probably some of the ambient noises—while not quite on par with, say, Aliens vs. Predator, it still manages to create a fairly strong, suspenseful environment.

Elite Force II is very much a single-player experience; so much of the game relies on Star Trek story and setting that it had to be. Back in the old days, a game could get away with just tacking on a few multiplayer levels and game modes and enjoying a decent amount of success. Now, however, in the post Quake III: Arena and Unreal Tournament era, most games which aren't expressly designed for multiplayer mayhem can't hang. Elite Force II, unfortunately for the Trekkies out there lusting for some holodeck action, is no exception; while it does include a fairly comprehensive game experience—several maps, game modes, models, and even a few Unreal Tournament-esque mutators—it doesn't have anything that other games don't. Even if you really, really, really want to like Elite Force II's multiplayer, you'll have to find your own friends to play with, because no one else plays it—the master server list, at last count, yielded 11 servers, all empty. The players have spoken: if you want multiplayer, go play something else.

Ultimately, Star Trek: Elite Force II delivers what you'd expect it to deliver; a quality single-player, first-person shooter experience that's a very good way to kill some time if that's what you're in the mood for. Star Trek fans will probably love it, but it wasn't designed exclusively for them; gamers simply in the mood to wreak some havoc, like me, will have plenty of fun with it as well. Anyone who purchases this game expecting groundbreaking interactivity like Deus Ex, intense multiplayer like Quake III: Arena or Unreal Tournament 2004, or a plot as engaging as Halo's will undoubtedly be disappointed. Rather, Elite Force II is its own beast, incorporating interactivity, multiplayer, and plot into its own blend rather than focusing on one to the exclusion of the others, and frankly, it does a damn fine job of it.