Brikar

"Star Trek Encounters" for Playstation2
Produced by Bethesda Softworks

GAMEPLAY
"Star Trek Encounters" is a top-down, arcade-style combat game. Players progress linearly through the entire "Star Trek" timeline, starting out with Archer's NX-01 through the Original Series, Next Gen, VOY and then the Enterprise-E (labelled "Star Trek: Sovereign".)

The NX-01 missions have you engaged in combat to destroy the Xindi planet-killer weapon. The first mission also serves as a training exercise to acclimate players to the controls which are, to be honest, somewhat wonky. You move your ship with the left thumbstick, and aim your weapons with the right. When you move the cursor over an enemy ship, you can hit R2 to lock on or R1 to simply fire.

Locking on is somewhat complicated. When you lock onto a ship, you can choose to target specific systems such as shields, sensors, weapons, or engines. However, instead of being able to choose, the game cycles through them in order and you fire when you get to the one you want to hit. In addition, in order to cycle through the options, you must hover your cursor over the ship in question. If the ship moves out of your cursor, you lose your lock and you have to move the cursor over the ship again to start cycling once more.

Starfleet ships are equipped with phasers and photon torpedoes. Klingon ships have pulse disruptors, which are rapid-fire but cannot use targeting lock. In addition, ships also have secondary options such as cloaking device, transporter (to send away teams to enemy ships to retrieve information or to sabotage) mines and tractor beams. In order to use the transporter, you must again lock onto the ship in question and wait until the game cycles to "Away Team" and then hit the "fire" button.

Missions mostly include blasting away at wave after wave of enemy ships, though there's some variety thrown in. For example, one of the "Next Generation" missions involves a kamikaze Romulan warbird headed for a Federation starbase. It's shields are too powerful for your weapons, so you must follow it into an asteroid field and destroy radioactive asteroids as it passes to disrupt your shields and allow you a small window when you can damage the warbird. Other missions have you scan for warp signatures to find certain ships, to outrun the shockwave of the detonating Genesis planet, or defending the Enterprise using only mines and tractor beams after the engines and weapons systems are disabled.

All that said... the game has more depth than I first expected, but is still mostly just driving your ship around blowing shit up. True, it's satisfying, but it really makes the game less than a MUST-OWN item. But as a budget title (Best Buy has it for a mere $14.99), it's more than worth it. The overly complicated controls can make certain missions frustrating, especially things that involve any kind of time limit, but like I said, it's fairly satisfying when things are going well and you're really tearing apart the enemy.

In addition to the main campaigns, there are several varieties of "Skirmish" mode, both single and multi-player. Head-to-Head is self explanatory. Pick a ship, pick how many frags, and start blastin. Battlefest is similar, except you pick several ships and then must destroy the entire enemy "team" of ships to win. Onslaught gives you three lives and then sends unending waves of enemies at you until you bite it. This one's littered with all kinds of power-ups to help you extend your life. You'll get cloaking devices, invincibility, double and quad damage, rapid-fire torpedo upgrades, unlimited phasers, etc, all of which last for only a short time, so use them wisely.

GRAPHICS
"Encounters" is not a terribly pretty game. The camera stays pretty distant from the ships, so the models are not terribly detailed. There are, however, a lot of cool lighting effects and gas clouds to go around. Planets, moons, suns, nebulas, asteroids and debris fields litter every level, so you're rarely ever looking at a dull black background. Explosions are pretty nifty, and the ships tear apart with lots of flying debris and funky shockwaves. Weaponsfire looks pretty authentic, to boot.

AUDIO
With sound options set on "Surround", "Encounters" is not a bad sounding game. Good bass when things go boom, authentic sound effects and a decent (albiet repetitive) score make the game sound a bit bigger than it actually is. William Shatner narrates the game, regardless of the era you're playing, but does so without too much enthusiasm, even mispronouncing words like "Xindi".

But he's Captain Kirk, damn it, so we should all just bow down and worship the ground he hovers over majestically.

OVERALL
For $14.99, "Star Trek Encounters" is a fun little game, though nothing amazing. There's a novelty factor of playing through the entire Trek timeline, and the gameplay has just enough depth to it to keep boredom at bay about 95% of the time (moving from one end of the sector to another at impulse without meeting any enemies = dull).

GRADE
Gameplay: B
Graphics C+
Audio: B
Overall: B/B-

__________________
"A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown."

http://olympusmans.blogspot.com
http://benforrealz.blogspot.com

Stag

It would be nice if you could adjust the SFX and music volume independantly. Also, the time constrained portions of the game are fairly challenging, only because of the "wonky" controls.

An ok game for the price.

Brikar

That's pretty much how I feel... for 15 dollars, it's moderately entertaining. I can pick it up and play for a little while at a time.

__________________
"A million monkeys typing until the end of time will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Ten thousand monkeys typing for ten thousand years will write a Hemingway. Ten monkeys typing over Columbus Day weekend will give you a Dan Brown."

http://olympusmans.blogspot.com
http://benforrealz.blogspot.com