Written by Jeff Buckland, 6/30/2003
Played on:
Windows
Much like the Star Wars franchise, Star Trek has had its own long run of hit-and-miss licensed games. Knowing nothing about the Elite Force games, one might guess that a Star Trek first person shooter would be a bad decision. Raven Software delivered an admirable experience with the first game, and now Ritual has shipped a sequel that may lack some ambition, but it's undeniably a solid game.
The venerable Quake 3 engine is getting used yet again, although I'm sure that by now the source code hardly resembles what it did around four years ago when Q3 was released. This is the best use of the engine to date, as special effects and texture quality are at an all-time high. Frame rates are pretty smooth and consistent up to a point - set things too high and the game engine will bog down pretty badly.
Elite Force 2 lacks any of the latest whiz-bang features like pixel shaders that are starting to show up in today's games; Quake 3 of course didn't support them, and I doubt it was worth the effort trying to add support for this stuff to a years-old engine. Even though the Q3 platform is somewhat limited when it comes to large areas or great features, it's very compatible, runs well in both single- and multiplayer, and it's relatively easy to make a game with.
The biggest technical issue I had with Elite Force 2 was with the crashes. It would drop back to the desktop occasionally while playing, and alt-tabbing out of the game resulted in it crashing immediately about half of the time - even on a fresh Windows XP install with DirectX 9 and the newest Radeon Catalyst 3.5 drivers (3.4 did this as well). At least it wouldn't bring the whole system down; it would just quietly close itself with an error box. I also tested this on my secondary computer, which is an Athlon XP 1700+ with Windows 2000 and Radeon 9100 video card, and I got the same thing. These problems aren't likely to happen to everyone, though, as I do have one common issue that wasn't easily switched for testing purposes: the Radeon video cards.
Ritual has made sure that both veteran and novice FPS players can quickly get started. Key bindings are simple and intuitive, and all of the advanced tricks and gadgetry are used with your handy tricorder. The controls are smooth and clean, and feel very much like the Quake 3 we all know.
The save interface is flawless; it will create new auto-save points at several points throughout a mission, the quicksaves work perfectly, and load times are respectable. They're not lighting fast, but on the computer I played it on (listed at the top of this review), nothing took longer than six or seven seconds.
Here's one area that Ritual has really excelled in. The Star Trek universe itself is a tough license to work with, as many of the environments and characters are dearly loved by the fans; screwing anything up can really disappoint your audience. This left Ritual to balance between things taken directly from the shows (or movies), and forging new ground with additional enemies, weapons, and environments. Ritual has done an excellent job adding just enough to make it exciting and new, without letting down the Star Trek fan base.
The environments you will explore are mostly complex indoors levels; some areas look nice and outdoorsy, but the level design winds up being mostly linear and keeps you moving along. The weapons you use are all high-tech variations of your standard FPS guns: pistol, shotgun, submachine gun, rocket launcher, grenade launcher, sniper rifle. The special effects for these are usually pretty impressive, although nothing really stood out to be exemplary.
I have to ask: what is with the damn spider levels? Many FPS games have included levels full of ugly spiders, the most recent that I remember being Unreal 2. And just like U2, Elite Force 2 includes mutant alien spiders - these are multicolored and range in size. Yes, a spider queen boss is included as well, which rounds out the FPS spider stereotype. My mild amount of arachnophobia aside, these levels seem to universally be no fun - at least Elite Force 2 only includes one spider level.
I'll start off here by saying that I'm not much of a fan of recent Star Trek shows. Elite Force 2 specifically left the "Voyager" name off its title (it was in the title for the first game); the reason why they did this is because game starts off just before the Voyager finds its way home. After the first mission is over and a few years pass in the game's story, you start off with a new Hazard Team working under Captain Picard on the Enterprise.
Your character is James Munro, your standard heroic all-American white guy. There are several people in the new Hazard Team, most of which will rotate out when on missions. Those who want to make sure of the usual Star Trek staples need not worry; yes, some Ensign Whatshisname dies, Klingons spout off their usual sayings, and you even get to hear a Tribble story from an NPC.
The missions you head out on follow a plot that starts out pretty engaging, throws you some twists, then gets a bit convoluted near the end. The finale is quite predictable, but that seems to be par for the course, and it doesn't really take away from the game. You'll come across a couple of new races, the Attrexians and the Idryll, as well as everyone's favorites, Klingons and Romulans. You get to participate in action with all of these races, whether it's in cooperation with them or fighting against them.
The plot revolves around a type of bio-engineered creature that is insect-like, smart, and has its own propulsion systems for attacking installations or planets. Without giving too much away, let's just say that these things range up in size from waist-high to.. uh.. big. While these things aren't the aforementioned spiders, they are only slightly more interesting to fight; it's the variety of these aliens later on that makes them more exciting overall.
