|
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
Review: Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force Expansion PackReviewed By: Bill Stiteler Review Date: February 5, 2002
Playing Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force was a strange experience. It was like being in an episode of Voyager, only, well, interesting things happened. I don't want to say Voyager was a boring TV show, but it was rather like Gilligan's Island in space (or rather, Gilligan's Planet, I suppose). Are they going to get home this time? Probably not. Perhaps they can string a new warp core together from coconuts.
I loved the game, so when an expansion pack was announced, I was hyped. Even moreso, considering that one of its major features was a "Virtual Voyager," where you could explore the ship at your leisure, finding secret areas and such. I loved the story and its telling most of all, and here they were, giving me two heaping scoops of it! The result? Eh.
If you meet these requirements, you get a bunch of new holodeck maps (multiplayer mode), single-player missions, and the "Virtual Voyager" bit, all of which are aggressively adequate. Holodeck continue to be a shortcoming, especially considering they were based on the Quake 3 engine. The maps still feel small, and the weapons which rocked your world in the game itself again feel unresponsive in player vs. player action. As for the Virtual Voyager, I'm not sure what I was expecting. Actually, I do. And I think the designers did as well, because they kept giving me brief tastes of it.
What's worse is that at times it seemed like something exciting or suspenseful was going to happen, and then didn't. For example, Seven tells you that Biesmann is showing an inordinate amount of interest in her alcove (insert joke here). So trotting off to the cargo bay that Seven calls home, you find that Biesmann is indeed scanning it with his tricorder, and is irritable, even angry when you try to speak to him. Later, crawling out of the requisite Jeffries Tube, you come across two crewmembers below you, unaware of your presence. "I hope we're doing the right thing," one of them mutters. "Oh-ho!" think I, "This is one of those Trek episodes where everyone's behaving strangely, and I have to discover why!" Which would have been a waaaaaay cool way to do a non-shooting based Trek game. Only, it's not. Biesmann's just angry, that way he doesn't have to talk to you. The crewman are keeping a secret, but as an excuse to keep them from talking to you. Even Telsia, who was on the verge of inviting you back to her room after rescuing her from certain death, suddenly would rather stare out the window and say "I'll talk to you later." Every single entity on the ship is too busy to talk to you. Shades of Infocom.
The walkthrough bit is like being invited to the Playboy mansion the week they're spraying for potato bugs. The Easter Egg hunt is like coming home from the state fair holding a yard stick with a senator's name on it and wearing a pickle hat. You're not sure what use they are, but you felt you needed them at the time. While I still heartily recommend the original Elite Force to anyone (great shooter, great storytelling), the Expansion Pack will appeal only to the hardest of Voyager-centric Trek Geeks. And even they'll be disappointed to discover that they can shut off the warp core, trigger a red alert, and transport to forbidden areas of the ship, but they can't open Janeway's underwear drawer. I know I was.
 [an error occurred while processing this directive]
|
. |
Cool Mac Gear• iPod 1G-2G • iPod 3G • iPod 4G • iPod Mini • PowerBook-iBook • Keyboard Skins • Garageband
|
||||
But back to Voyager, the game. Elite Force wove a complex story which was not only true to the Trek mythos, but showed a lot of love (the evil Federation from Mirror, Mirror? Beautiful). But Trek, yes, even Voyager, was built around the idea that characters drive stories, and so it was with Elite Force. Each of the characters had his/her own personality. You could eavesdrop on conversations. One of them even started to profess The Love Which Dare Not Speak Its Name (On Broadcast TV When It's Not Sweeps Week, Anyway), before rushing off. Elite Force was an amazing sensory experience.
First off, getting the game to run was a pain. Usually, a game's "minimum requirements" are soft recommendations. If you want to play the game at a disappointing speed on your old Mac, have at it. We are coming to the end of this age, I think. MacSoft's developers have been putting code in the games that checks to see what your processor speed is, for one. Other games, like the Elite Force Expansion, just plain don't run right. I installed it on my 9600/350, and the startup screen was illegible. By guesswork, I figured out what I was supposed to hit to start the game. Then it locked up while loading. I transferred the game to an iBook which met the processor requirement but not the video, apparently, and had the same problem. But loading it on a real, official Blue and White tower, it ran fine the first time. Be advised. These minimum requirements are for real (even though I ran the original game on that very same 9600).
As I said before, the greatest thing about Elite Force was the experience of being in an episode and interacting with the characters. How sad that in the Virtual experience, all of that is missing. With the exception of Seven of Nine, who tells you where you can go, nobody wants to talk to you. Granted, being ordered around by Jeri Ryan is a fantasy of many, but having her give you a laundry list of things to do and then ignoring you is not thrilling gameplay.
Okay, so it's a walkthrough. So why put the characters on it? Why set it up in the continuity of the game? That just makes Alex (your avatar in Elite Force), creepy as heck, getting secret security access codes so she can unlock people's doors and read their private journal entries. And they're not even that exciting, I might add, just different perspectives on what happened in the original game. It's also an Easter Egg hunt. Wandering around, you can pick up such goodies as Elite Force Action Figures (collect all nine!), contraband weapons, and various other trinkets around the ship. For what reason? As a way of making sure you've explored all the explorable areas. That's it.