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Categories: Review
Tags: ps2, star trek

If there’s a platform out there, then Bethesda Softworks has a Star Trek game ready for it. First in Bethsoft’s fusillade is Star Trek: Encounters for the PS2. The PS2 hasn’t seen a Trek game since 2004’s Star Trek: Shattered Universe and Bethesda is counting on gamers having forgotten that TOS-themed POS. Encounters, unlike the upcoming Tactical Assault or Legacy, is an arcade-styled shooter which puts the player in command of every capital ship from every Trek series.

Starting with the NX-01 and ending with Enterprise-E, Episode play takes players through a short series of missions focused around a specific era. The Enterprise missions pit Archer’s crew against the Xindi; later missions feature Federation foes: Romulans, Klingons, and other familiar baddies. The game is called Encounters, but don’t expect anything other than hostile interactions here. Even healing a space organism has Picard and company fending off antibodies with phaser blasts.

Encounters is played from a top-down perspective, with the player steering the Enterprise/Defiant/Voyager (yawn) with the left analog stick and using the right analog stick to activate the targeting slice/sensors. The targeting slice is a wedge that shows the capital ship’s firing arc and is used mission-specifically to scan ships and detect warp signatures.

Once enemy vessels are in your targeting slice, you can open up with phasers or photon torpedoes. Locking on to enemy vessels takes more time, but guarantees hits—doing system-specific damage and launching tracking torpedoes. Because Trek is cool like that, you can also lay mines to take out clumsy pilots, ramp up the tractor beam, or use away teams to steal from enemy vessels (or wessels). The game is also faux-3D, letting you adjust your ship’s altitude above and below the playing field–useful for dodging mines and asteroids.

All this might sound like a platform version of the awesome Starfleet Command. It’s not. Encounters trades tactics for speed and most ship-to-ship combat is ended with a few phaser hits. Die-hard Trekkers might wonder how transporters are working through the shields and don’t even think of realigning the warp coil and shields to use the saucer section as a conduit for a tachyon burst.

There’s some nice variety here. Combat is the focus, but missions involving space station defense or stealthy incursions into hostile territory require a bit more planning and finesse. There’s also a reward for exploration: finding crew cards who add bonuses to the ship’s systems (Worf boosts targeting, Scotty boosts engines). The unlocked crew cards and ships are viewable from the menu and you can also check out the other single/multiplayer options–variations on head-to-head combat and a survival mode.

It all sounds good (and looks great), especially for the budgetware that Encounters is, but the game is crippled by a few rookie mistakes. First up, there’s not much variation between the eras. The NX-01 handles like the NCC-1701 and since the only voice work is subdued narration by William Shatner (not as Captain Kirk), the different personalities don’t come through. The game throws a few curveballs, but they usually miss–like a chance to control DS9 which morphs into a game of Asteroids. Next, it’s a mistake to think that players like all Treks equally. The Episode system requires you begin in the Enterprise era and then play through mission by mission to the game’s end. This has two problems: you can’t skip to your favorite series and you can’t skip missions. So when you hit a freaking wall in the first Voyager mission, it’s either time to throw a few hours at the game or chill until the cheats come out. The Voyager game-killing mission does win authenticity points for cribbing from a Next Generation episode, much like the series did. Finally, each era has a different amount of missions. The Old Show has five missions to Next Gen’s four and DS9 only has two. Hell, back in 2001 DS9’s Dominion Wars was its own game!

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