Star Trek

I consider myself a fan of Star Trek but like many franchises they have their good, their bad and their video game adaptations. This Star Trek game, released in 2013, is modelled on the reboot series of movies started in 2009 now known as the “Kelvin Timeline” trilogy and it is a full, 3rd person, cover based shooter. Whilst I want to moan that action is one of Star Trek’s less interesting genres, it is a heavy focus of the movies this game is based on, so I probably have to let that slide.

The characters in the game are modelled after their movie actors and the primary cast from the films actually voice their characters, which really surprised me but also makes sense as I was initially thinking that whoever they got to do the voices were doing some very good impressions.

The graphics are quite good for the time. The game shares the same flashy art direction as the movies with bright lights, lots of lens flare and all round shiny surfaces but when you get into some of the details and especially the faces, it doesn’t hold up quite as well.

It’s a very standard third person shooter. Again it’s not a strength of the films but the elements that make Star Trek stand out don’t feel meaningfully explored here and you could re-skin this game to almost anything you wanted to. The gameplay loop is mostly to find cover and shoot the bad guys who in this game are largely the Gorn.

There is some light platforming which is unfortunately underpinned by some fairly bad mechanics and some light exploration with your tricorder where you can open doors, manipulate electronics or collect information.

If there is one good reason to seek this game out, it’s for its full, local, co-op campaign. If anything I would say that this game is intended to be played co-op, one as Kirk and the other as Spock. The game does make use of its dual lead characters by making different players perform actions to unblock the other and move them along. In single player your partner is replaced by a mostly competent, but sometimes buggy, AI player. And by AI I am referring to the old video game meaning of AI, not this 2020 era AI definition.

This game is packed with all the tropes of a mid-generation PlayStation 3 title, even Spock and Kirk grab hold of ledges and leap from pillar to pillar in the style of Assassins Creed or Uncharted. There really isn’t much to say about it. I would say only look it up if you are looking for some couch co-op games or are a huge fan of these movies.

The other most interesting thing I could find to say about it was you can lock the in-game doors. So many games have locked doors that require a mechanic or puzzle to unlock them, but how many games let you then re-lock it afterwards. Why is that here? I can only assume for each of the co-op players to play some pranks with each other. 10/10 door mechanics.