Straight Jacket Type Fun
Elite Force 2
Ok, before you go out and buy this game you need to ask yourself a few questions. Ask yourself: (A) Am I Star Trek fan? (B) Am I able to not demand the highest quality of games in every single game I ever buy? (C) Do I enjoy a good story in my game as much as some action and blowing up stuff good? If you answered yes to any of these, well, I really don't give a crap. But I do think that despite a few minor nitpicks with this game, Elite Force 2 will easily please any fan of the Trek universe and appeal to your average first person shooter fan.
So, let's get the nitpick out of the way that I have. To do that though, you have to see where I'm coming from in regards to the story of the game. Your character is part of a Hazard Team unit. You're basically a heavily armed team that goes down to planets or investigates things in not so friendly environments. There's no faceless red shirts in this crowd. Kirk and his away teams? Wimps compared to you and your group.
Your team is picked up by Picard and you go onto the Enterprise to investigate an alien infestation. Long story short, you and your team go from planet to planet, even ship to ship to find out who's behind the creation of these aliens and you're supposed to arm up and stop them.
And therein lies my biggest problem with the game. As you're initially told about these aliens you get the impression you're going to be taking on something akin to the numbers and sizes from the "Aliens" movie. Dozens, no hundreds of aliens all willing to throw themselves into your phaser sites to be made a green mess on the floor. Rather, this being the Quake 3 Engine, you're given, at most, perhaps a half dozen aliens on the screen at any one time. Was the game geared to more mid-range systems with lesser video cards? I suppose so and that makes sense from a business standpoint so I won't fault Ritual for doing that. But it would have been nice to have more on the screen. I was wishing for Serious Sam type numbers but that's just me. I like lots of bad guys going squish.
Set Phaser to Geek
Not that there isn't other things to do though. There's enough Trek lore and inside jokes in this game to make any Trek fan's Spock ears pop right off their head. You get to talk it up with Picard and cruise around the universe in the Enterprise-E as well as fight through it's corridors. If you've seen the alien in the series you will probably get to shoot them in this game. All your favorite Trek baddies are here: Romulans, Ferrengi, Klingons, Borg, and Andorians. Plus you get plenty of Trek-like weapons to fight them with. Hand phasers, rifle phasers, sniper phasers, gatling phasers, grenade launchers and so on. If there's a bad guy on the screen chances are you've got the right medicine for him to suck down in the way of charged particle weapons.
The voice acting is pretty top notch. Not only does Patrick Stewart lend his voice to Captain Picard, but there's even the voice of Reginald Barclay, and even the most prolific unknown actor on Trek, Jeffrey Combs, lends his voice to the part of a Romulan. If you're a Trek geek you know who I'm talking about and probably just fired your own special type of photon torpedo.
Shoot the bad guys? Picard said to "Make it So, homey"
The Borg: Don't like you much.
Gamin'
Yeah, so ok Sphinx, there's plenty of Trek in there to make the biggest Trek geek have their coke bottle glasses fog up for a week and allow them to beam up something in their pants. But what about the standard shooter player? Honestly, it's really going to depend on what you're looking for in a first person shooter. Let's take an example. Hidden areas. Do you like hunting for them and feel like you're in the know for knowing how to jump across three levels of crates to find the secret area? Well, you'll probably like Elite Force 2. Not only because it truly embraces the idea of hidden areas but it also gives you neat prizes for finding the secret areas! Look!
Look what's in the cereal box!
Find enough of those things and you can quickly unlock secret levels outside of the normal gameplay. In fact, there's secret stuff all over the maps. I had an uber screenshot of one of those areas but sadly my screenshots didn't come out for some reason. Probably has something to do with anisiotropic filtering on a Radeon card. Best guess but I see this happen on any Q3 engine game I play. So, that's why my screenshots suck this time around.
Regardless, the secret level I found turned the screen into a Nintendo world looking like Super Mario Brothers where you jumped across platforms to grab a bunch of those gold ship medallions. It's a special touch like that which makes this old game player get a good laugh. Such a nice touch is the sign of game designers who are not just going through the motions of churning out product. In fact, it makes you wonder how much of this was down with tongue firmly in cheek and a wink and a nod to the source material as if to say, "Let's get geeky."
Level design completely submerges you in the Trek world. Exploring strange new worlds is an understatement here. You continually are bouncing between starship levels, starbase levels, industrial planets, and arctic colonies. While you do sometimes double back to a place you've already been, the nice thing is you spend a minimal amount of time in that same area. In one case on a starship, the situation changes so much that you're not just exploring the ship, you are then fighting for your life. The fact that you were exploring those halls earlier makes it much easier to navigate while fighting for your life.
There's also a LOT of cut scenes and exposition as well. I'm talking at least one or two per level but go ahead and watch them. It won't hurt you. They're actually quite entertaining and are integral to the storyline since the in-between load screens don't tell you nearly enough of what needs to be done.
Finally, saving your game. A lot of games find it fun recently to only let you save at certain points during the game. This is stupid and punishes a player by making them slog through the same area of the map over and over again. I consider that stupid. I already fought through an area and I don't want to repeat it. By my estimates that adds about an extra hour or two overall gameplay which translates to an hour or two of unfun gameplay and the potential for me not buying your stupid product anymore. Fortunately, Ritual didn't do that with Elite Force 2. Hit that save button as much as you like.
End Transmission
Elite Force 2 on it's own is a fine first person shooter. It doesn't break exceedingly new ground in terms of graphics, gameplay, or audio. However, it does fully exploit the Trek license as well as provide you some throwback game elements that have been lacking in more recent first person shooters that take themselves too seriously.