Star Trek: Encounters
Blow stuff up through a half-dozen different Star Trek eras. Or, um, don't, actually.
Published: November 4, 2006
Few licenses come with as much of a dedicated install base or seemingly endless lore as Star Trek. Almost half a decade of TV shows and movies will do that for a series, but over the years, there's a been a conscious effort to expand the timeline and characters into something that has a real wealth of content. So when you buy the Star Trek license, you're getting a huge amount of stuff to tap. So why does Encounters throw most of it away in favor of mindless battles and incredibly frustrating stacked odds?
Part of it might be that the game is a value-priced offering and thus delivers about $20 of gameplay, but what's so frustrating is that there was a ton of potential here. The very notion of an action game set in the Enterprise, Original Series, Next Generation, Deep Space Nice, Voyager and the Encounters-created Sovereign (where you take on the titular class Enterprise from the most recent movies') timelines are rife with opportunity and yet aside from aesthetics and different enemies, none of them really feel any different.
That's boiling things down a little too much, but it's the truth; in each timeline, you'll end up tractor beaming things, weaving through obstacle courses and taking on increasingly insane amounts of enemies without really offering any strategy. Oh, you can use the d-pad to shift energy from the shields to weapons or from sensors to engines (and vice-versa), and the game offers the ability to fire either where the sensors are pointed (accomplished with the right analog stick) or straight ahead, but by and large this is a twitch shooter.
And if it weren't for missions that start throwing an impossible number of opponents at you -- usually while juggling some kind of escort or towing something in the most annoying examples -- this would actually have been a rather solid twitch shooter. Though you'll never really get the sense that you're controlling a massive ship because all the craft are so (necessarily) agile, there was still room to deepen the experience by adding some crew commands or maybe even light repairs.
Instead, developer 4J Studios (who are also working on the PlayStation 3 port of Oblivion) bogged the game down with the aforementioned tractor beaming and escort missions or using the sensors to follow warp trails. All the while, combat is mixed in, usually progressing on a different plane (though it seems 3D, there are really only three levels that ships fly on, which certainly makes sense given the quicker combat). The result is a game that doesn't quite know what it is most of the time, and almost completely neglects the Star Trek license all the time.
Oh, there are some basic Star Trek elements, of course; in each era, you can scoop up little icons that are supposed to represent that Enterprise's crew members, giving you boosts to engines, weapons, sensors and eventually the full ship stats. William Shatner also provides the game's only voiceovers, but he's not only in non-Kirk mode, he sounds like he's about 10 seconds from slipping into a coma during any given line. You can practically hear the paycheck being written in the background as he finishes.
This is the game's biggest problem: it's Star Trek in name and dressing only, and the whole time I was playing through the game, I kept getting little hints of what could have been a great take on the universe, but it's all thrown away in favor of a game that merely skims the surface of the license. The story line, such as it is in each era, is mainly there just to connect basic objectives and true to the pure action approach of the game, is mostly throwaway.
Maybe it's just that the game doesn't look like a bargain bin entry, and that's enough to make me expect more. No, the game isn't a graphics showcase or anything, but it is a rather solid entry with some nice little touches; parallax effects give the appearance of moving through a dense field of stars (though when things like galaxies traveling on a very obvious plane crop up, it's distracting), at times planets will cast shadows across the milky sunlit expanse around them, sunlight glints off the saucer sections of the ships. The framerate is fairly solid to boot, though it's rare that there's anything that really pushes things.
Aurally, it's a little more muted. You'll hear some great series-specific sound effects, and Shatner's wooden delivery of the pre-mission details is there, but by and large it's the music in the game, something that treads the line between the more action-oriented stuff in the films and the more accented work in the TV shows, but as a whole it does a good job. The main theme (which is reused a little throughout the game) doesn't really have the same sort of oomph as the pre-Enterprise TV show intros, but again, it's solid enough to get the job done.
In all honesty, if this wasn't a Star Trek game, I probably wouldn't be so hard on it. $20 isn't a whole lot to pay for a fairly solid action game, but there's no getting around the fact that this was supposed to be a Star Trek game, and it merely skims the surface of the absolutely insane amount of history and technobabble that was presented over the course of the past four decades. Encounters isn't meant to be an especially deep game, but it has the dubious distinction of being launched in conjunction with Star Trek's 40th Anniversary. This is not the kind of birthday present the series -- or the folks that enjoy 'em -- should be getting.
Part of it might be that the game is a value-priced offering and thus delivers about $20 of gameplay, but what's so frustrating is that there was a ton of potential here. The very notion of an action game set in the Enterprise, Original Series, Next Generation, Deep Space Nice, Voyager and the Encounters-created Sovereign (where you take on the titular class Enterprise from the most recent movies') timelines are rife with opportunity and yet aside from aesthetics and different enemies, none of them really feel any different.
That's boiling things down a little too much, but it's the truth; in each timeline, you'll end up tractor beaming things, weaving through obstacle courses and taking on increasingly insane amounts of enemies without really offering any strategy. Oh, you can use the d-pad to shift energy from the shields to weapons or from sensors to engines (and vice-versa), and the game offers the ability to fire either where the sensors are pointed (accomplished with the right analog stick) or straight ahead, but by and large this is a twitch shooter.
And if it weren't for missions that start throwing an impossible number of opponents at you -- usually while juggling some kind of escort or towing something in the most annoying examples -- this would actually have been a rather solid twitch shooter. Though you'll never really get the sense that you're controlling a massive ship because all the craft are so (necessarily) agile, there was still room to deepen the experience by adding some crew commands or maybe even light repairs.
Instead, developer 4J Studios (who are also working on the PlayStation 3 port of Oblivion) bogged the game down with the aforementioned tractor beaming and escort missions or using the sensors to follow warp trails. All the while, combat is mixed in, usually progressing on a different plane (though it seems 3D, there are really only three levels that ships fly on, which certainly makes sense given the quicker combat). The result is a game that doesn't quite know what it is most of the time, and almost completely neglects the Star Trek license all the time.
Oh, there are some basic Star Trek elements, of course; in each era, you can scoop up little icons that are supposed to represent that Enterprise's crew members, giving you boosts to engines, weapons, sensors and eventually the full ship stats. William Shatner also provides the game's only voiceovers, but he's not only in non-Kirk mode, he sounds like he's about 10 seconds from slipping into a coma during any given line. You can practically hear the paycheck being written in the background as he finishes.
This is the game's biggest problem: it's Star Trek in name and dressing only, and the whole time I was playing through the game, I kept getting little hints of what could have been a great take on the universe, but it's all thrown away in favor of a game that merely skims the surface of the license. The story line, such as it is in each era, is mainly there just to connect basic objectives and true to the pure action approach of the game, is mostly throwaway.
Maybe it's just that the game doesn't look like a bargain bin entry, and that's enough to make me expect more. No, the game isn't a graphics showcase or anything, but it is a rather solid entry with some nice little touches; parallax effects give the appearance of moving through a dense field of stars (though when things like galaxies traveling on a very obvious plane crop up, it's distracting), at times planets will cast shadows across the milky sunlit expanse around them, sunlight glints off the saucer sections of the ships. The framerate is fairly solid to boot, though it's rare that there's anything that really pushes things.
Aurally, it's a little more muted. You'll hear some great series-specific sound effects, and Shatner's wooden delivery of the pre-mission details is there, but by and large it's the music in the game, something that treads the line between the more action-oriented stuff in the films and the more accented work in the TV shows, but as a whole it does a good job. The main theme (which is reused a little throughout the game) doesn't really have the same sort of oomph as the pre-Enterprise TV show intros, but again, it's solid enough to get the job done.
In all honesty, if this wasn't a Star Trek game, I probably wouldn't be so hard on it. $20 isn't a whole lot to pay for a fairly solid action game, but there's no getting around the fact that this was supposed to be a Star Trek game, and it merely skims the surface of the absolutely insane amount of history and technobabble that was presented over the course of the past four decades. Encounters isn't meant to be an especially deep game, but it has the dubious distinction of being launched in conjunction with Star Trek's 40th Anniversary. This is not the kind of birthday present the series -- or the folks that enjoy 'em -- should be getting.
