Any such frustration won't last long, because most of the missions in Elite Force are paced very briskly. You'll face new foes, find new weapons, encounter new challenges, and uncover new elements of the plot frequently yet unpredictably enough. The game pits you against some of the most popular Star Trek villains, including the Klingons and the Borg - along with several interesting new additions to the Star Trek mythos. Unfortunately, the campaign is fairly short and won't be very difficult for shooter veterans; and all the action takes place in rather close quarters. It's disappointing that the campaign is so short because it's generally so well done. Clearly, the designers' time went into creating high-quality action sequences, rather than just a lot of them - but you'll still wish there were more.
Throughout the game, the highly detailed 3D characters, including all the regular cast of the show, are easily distinguishable and also have fairly articulate facial expressions as they speak their lines convincingly. Elite Force even gives you the option to play as either a male or a female character - Alexander or Alexandria Munro, both "Alex" for short. Both the male and female alter egos are confident and charismatic characters, and the game's dialogue changes slightly depending on which of the characters you choose. Elite Force also features a great interactive tutorial that takes place in the Voyager's holodeck, whose realistic holographic projections create a makeshift obstacle course that you're instructed on how to traverse.
The holodeck is also prominent in Elite Force's multiplayer mode, which is in many ways just as impressive, and as clever, as the game's single-player mode. Dubbed the holomatch, this mode is presented as a combat-training simulation aboard the Voyager's holodeck. As such, the designers have been able to take some liberties in creating themed levels that you might not expect from a Star Trek game - among these are a medieval castle and an Old West ghost town, in addition to the more typical settings like Borg and Klingon ships. You can square off in the multiplayer levels against computer-controlled bots of variable skill levels, or against human opponents in deathmatch, capture-the-flag, or other standard multiplayer action modes.
Since the game uses id Software's state-of-the-art Quake III: Arena engine, the multiplayer combat in Elite Force is predictably smooth and fast - and it's also a lot of fun because of the good graphics and diverse levels and character models, as well as the game's fairly distinct emphasis on focused energy weapons, which require precise accuracy. The holomatch does have some problems - it's somewhat cumbersome to have to load a separate executable file to play the multiplayer game, but apparently this is because some of the game's 3D architecture is streamlined in multiplayer. Likewise, the game's multiplayer weapon balance seems skewed in favor of the rapid-firing guns like the tetryon pulse distruper, since players can move and dodge about so quickly; and some of the maps are noticeably more interesting and more complex than others.
But such criticisms are presented largely to convey the sense that, in a perfect world, Elite Force would have been better. However, given that most Star Trek games - and, in fact, most first-person shooters - aren't actually very good, then it's easy to see all of what makes Elite Force so special. It's undoubtedly one of the best Star Trek games to date, and its only rival in its genre so far this year is, unsurprisingly, Raven's own shooter, Soldier of Fortune.
- See more CNET content tagged:
- Star Trek,
- campaign,
- designer,
- Activision Inc.,
- character
%20PC%20Game%20reviews%20-%20CNET%20Reviews&srcUrl=http://reviews.cnet.com/pc-games/star-trek-voyager-elite/4505-9696_7-30976833-2.html){kind=small}