This action-packed Star Trek game is based in the continuity set up in the 2009 reboot of Gene Roddenberry’s classic series by J. J. Abrams. The Star Trek video game offers a sweeping journey of epic proportions across unexplored planets and enemy battleships with the latest 23rd century weapons and gear. It boasts a story filled with action-packed combat as Kirk and Spock work together to stop a legendary enemy race bent on conquering the galaxy. And for the first time ever, players are cast as Captain James T. Kirk and Spock in an unprecedented co-op experience, where the complementary personalities of these iconic characters push players to make strategic use of their alliance.
- Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC
Release Date: April 26, 2013 - Overall Score 4.6
- The Good:
It’s just that at first the graphics got my hopes up that this wouldn’t be a bad game. As long as they’re holding still, or engaged in general dive-rolling-into-cover actions, Kirk and Spock look and sound a lot like Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, respectively (’cause they did the voice acting). Particularly on the PC version, the texture detail is impressive, and most of the sounds and phaser-bolt effects are actually quite authentic. I’ll give developer Digital Extremes credit for at least attempting to cram in a wide variety of gameplay. The operative word, of course, is “attempting,” because what it actually did was to break up the boring third-person shooting with swimming, flying, space combat, and hacking minigames so mind-numbingly simple and repetitive and/or frustrating they made me eager to get back to just being bored. Ideally, co-op could save the day in a game like Star Trek… but in this case, it’s too dull and buggy to drag someone else with you. Bland combat with another person by your side doesn’t make it any less bland, but at least someone will be there to see the goofy physics launch an enemy into the air when you snipe them.
- The Bad:
As a life-long fan of the shows and films, I’ve seen a lot of bad Star Trek in my time… but playing Star Trek: The Game reminded me that it’ll never get any easier to see the potential of one of science fiction’s greatest universes squandered on a barely serviceable, paint-by-numbers third-person shooter. Terrible animations, dull combat, repetitive puzzles, and rampant bugs wore out Star Trek’s welcome long before its pointless story came to an end. It’s bad – lots of really clumsy-looking movement, people, and objects clipping through each other; crazy, badly lip-synced dialog (not that syncing it with this corny writing would fix it); and general screwups make Star Trek play like a blooper reel. It gets ugly. The Enterprise interior looks good enough (except for the weird Sick Bay level) but the alien ships and world you fight through are uniformly brownish and messy. Likewise, all the alien machine gun, shotgun, sniper rifle, and beam/rocket launcher equivalents are not only unremarkable in performance, they’re all lumpy chunks of alien technology that are difficult to even tell apart.