Scene For A Murder
Star Trek‘s locales are exercises in patience as each outstays its welcome by several hours. Hell, even Kirk belts out ironic commentary about the game’s length. At some point, you can tell going to the Gorn planet or hanging out on that Starbase was a really cool idea. Digital Extremes took that idea to an extreme by padding the game to the gills. Hey, the game says, I know you just completed your objective and I know you want to leave, but go ahead and do this new objective, it’ll just be another half hour, I swear.
The aforementioned Starbase level, where you confront an arrogant Commodore who shifts all the blame for the rift incident to Kirk, is a never-ending maze of template science-fiction locations you’ve seen a million times before. The game is so boring in its level design that I often got lost because so much of it looks identical. The Gorn planet seems to have been inspired by 1996’s Tomb Raider as you’ll do some wacky 3D platforming while shooting foes. Large, underwater swimming sections? Star Trek has you covered! I assume that Digital Extremes wasn’t given carte blanche authority to sculpt all the unseen parts of the ship (none of which are noteworthy), but they did see fit to make a huge chunk of the ship a grid to make a Gorn chase filled with ninety-degree turns so… exciting? Nope. (To their credit, they do introduce a really cool behind-the-scenes section that demonstrates how the ship’s turbolifts work.)
Star Trek didn’t want to be a simple shooter, so it sought to make the interface as complicated as possible by implementing the tricorder. Yep, you can scan stuff in the environment Metroid-style, but if you want to flip a switch (and you will be flipping lots of switches), you’ll need to do that through the tricorder, too. You can’t fire at anything while using the tricorder, so if that switch sure is taking a while to flip, you’ll be exposed. You’ll use the tricorder view to find invisible lines between consoles because you’ll need to power consoles a lot, too.
Digital Extremes didn’t want to complicate just the casual action of the game, they wanted to make weapon juggling a pain in the ass, too. You get to carry two weapons – sorry, you have your phaser on your person at all times, so it’s really just one elective weapon. The level introduces “infected” officers that are under Gorn influence, against their will. To complete special objectives, and to not hear Spock’s objections at every turn, you need to stun the infected officers. Unlike the films where a stun setting will subdue them, you’ll need to alt-fire your phaser to stun them, then punch them out. This makes a lot of sense if you’re just using your phaser through the game, but if you’ve picked up a heavy rifle, things get hairy when both Gorn and the infected start mixing up and you have to use your phaser for one enemy and your Starfleet rifle for the other and they’re right next to each other and you’re flipping between them and you can’t stun with one, but you’ve got the wrong gun selected and you just- phew, hang on, just… hang on, let me take my pills, hang on. It’s a shitty game mechanic that I’m sure someone thought was an incredibly clever trade-off at some point. Did I mention the game defaults to your phaser when you pull the trigger? Doesn’t even matter if you want to use that rifle as your primary firestarter, if you do something as subtle as run down a hallway, your character will tuck away your gun and you’ll need to press a button to re-select it. Over and over. I thought it was a bug; nope, it’s a feature.
Sometimes, you’ll even have to mix your tricorder and your gun together. In the case of an awkward boss fight, a Gorn Lieutenant is invisible and can only be fired upon when exposed by the hall’s sprinklers. Right, so even though you can see where the gunfire is coming from and shoot directly at it, it won’t hit anything because you didn’t whip out your tricorder and activate that specific sprinkler system to expose them. Oh God, the worst. The only thing preventing me from dropping my controller entirely from a few similar sequences was when the boss would get stuck in the environment and I’d be free to dump ammo into them. I felt no guilt whatsoever. Oh, and no melee. For being a Gears of War-like, there is absolutely no melee, unless of course you’re tackling an enemy by surprise, but that’s not going to happen.
For their part, the enemies are decent, but that’s largely because they’re really just Halo archetypes. You have tall blue ones that lay down smoke grenades, you have the shorter ones that get around pretty quick and you have the beam-lazing floating Sentinel-likes. The game tries to mix it up at times with a few old school gameplay diversions. You’ll actually get to battle as the Enterprise in a Panzer Dragoon-lite scene that seems to have been given an amount of design attention equivalent to the amount of time you play it, because it’s clunky and pretty terrible. The best sections of the game are the free fall Rebel Assault scenes in which you guide your character through a bunch of stuff happening on-screen.
The Noisy Sea
Well, I’ve covered the good and mediocre parts of the game, so what about the bad shit? Well, for starters, it looks like an Xbox 360 launch game. It looks decent when it’s glossed up with special effects like fires and colored lighting and flat the rest of the time
Let’s start with the atrocious AI. Each level seems to have an effective “time to Spock” in which your sidekick AI will break, sometimes forcing a restart. My Spock was a constant victim of the game’s AI and would often get stuck, stuck running, go in the wrong direction, fail to find his way, glitch out, run in frantic loops, on and on. I was thankful that I did at least have Spock to pick me up when I “died” – but when he doesn’t respond and winds up dying on his own, you’ll quickly get used to the game’s awful checkpointing. Be wary of micromanaging your sidekick because chances are good they’ll get stuck wherever you pointed them to, sometimes running at full speed. Enemies have a few choice habits of their own, like getting stuck in walls, or running past you entirely.
What about the rest of the game’s bugs? There are plenty. Would you notice a title card popping up for a section after you leave it? What about a Gorn in a hanging pose suspended fifty feet in the air? What about being on top of an interactive object and not being able to interact with it until you backed up and approached it again? Do you like having your reticle displayed in cutscenes like an amateur machinima? Do you like things breaking apart with loud noises and no graphic explosive effects? Do you like games that reorient your movement at random? Do you like characters that slide and pop to wherever they’re going or doing whatever they’re doing? What about shadows? Do you like characters to never have shadows? Do you like shadows to flicker in and out? Do you like cutscenes that cut off like your DVR recordings? Do you like ragdoll deaths to remind you that it’s been eleven years since ragdoll physics looked that bad? Do you like dying randomly in the environment because someone decided the level’s window dressing should be something you die from? Do you enjoy a game’s use of a cymbal roll as a stinger to indicate a conflict is over? Do you like it when the game is spawning so many enemies that as you kill them, the game sounds like a never-ending cymbal roll? Do you enjoy shitty stealth games built on shitty action games?
It’s that bad inside. Truly, truly terrible.
Why?
I have no idea what Digital Extremes did for three years. What did they even do with all of that Paramount money? They had plenty of time to make a bad game and then fix it into a good game at least twice. This isn’t even stupidity at this point, it’s just malice. This is the product of lowest-bidder development, a harsh example of why we can’t have good things and a reminder that the movie tie-in game is an unsalvageable wreck from which one cannot recover, regardless of the resources thrown at it. Star Trek: The Video Game is dire work, a terrible place. Few games can make Dead Island: Riptide look like a Blizzard release, but Digital Extremes has done it.
Do not make eye contact, do not hold its hand. If your friends need a coop partner, they are not your friends anymore. Avoid this game at all costs.
UPDATE: Added reference to no melee in game, which is completely bizarre.
Don't Keep This a
Secret, Share It