Star Trek Review

Star Trek is an inspirational game. Not in a good way, of course. But it is so immensely tiresome, so poor and such a cash-in that it has inspired me to change the way I review games, for one night only, and take the same approach to reviewing the game that it does to your time: put loads of bad things in linear succession.

Things that are good about Star Trek:

-Chris Pine’s face is nicely rendered.

-The opening of the game contains a reference to this scene in Rocky III.

-Some of the zero-gravity stuff when you’re outside of a ship is nice to look at.

Things that are bad about Star Trek:

– You play as a missile at one point, fired from the USS Enterprise. This is not a joke. When the missile hits its target, it crashes into it with all the venom of a rubber swimming float gently lapping into the side of a lane-swim only swimming pool. All combat is this empty. There’s more force in One Direction’s lyrics.

– Speaking of combat: while there’s nothing wrong with making a cover-based third-person shooter, the trick is to make the guns diverse, the stages interesting, and the AI not very, very stupid. Predictably, none of these things happen. Kirk might as well be firing a Nerf gun, the levels are variations on dull, sterile spaceship corridor/brown alien world, and Spock’s cold logic and reasoning obviously doesn’t extend to ‘not running in front of ALL THE TURRETS’. As for your enemies: sometimes they totally ignore what you’re doing, as if they know you’ve suffered enough. One sub-boss even went so far as to keep pulling out explosives from a box for you to shoot.

– There are loads of moments when you have to do the really…slow…Gears…walk…thing. And if not, Kirk and Spock run as if they are in one of those nightmares where you’re desperately trying to get away but no matter how fast you run The Terminator is still right BEHIND YOU.

– The rest of the game’s animation is hardly any better. Kirk and Spock jump like overextended Stretch Armstrong’s thrown into a zero-g environment, and overall it feels like your avatar is a suit filled with Play-Doh that you’ve got to keep upright enough to make it through the level.

– Kirk can walk right through Spock, further enforcing my belief that the Vulcan is simply the other side of his personality.

– There’s a mission where you spend a lot of time climbing in and out of vents like a demented chimney sweep called Jesse Vent-ura. Inevitably, Spock falls out of the vent at precisely the wrong moment every single time.

– All the cool stuff happens in the cutscenes, which inevitably start two seconds too early or late.

– Graphically, the game looks like an early 360 title, upscaled. As such, everyone has scary glass eyes and animate like Gerry Anderson puppets. Attempts at emotion look like freeze-frames of the Scanners head explosion, and the lip-synching makes even Ashley Simpson look good.

– Your enemies are Velociraptors…with guns.

– It’s buggy like Mothercare.

– Everything is ultra-static. The film this is being snuck out to tie in with contains less lifeless sets.

– The space-faring section where you play as the USS Enterprise’s guns and shoot down enemies that look like bottles of plug-in air freshener – and attack with the same – is the worst videogame sequence I’ve played this year.

– There’s no urgency. At all. One mission sees a spaceship being destroyed, with our heroes needing to run to the escape pods. Everyone else is standing around, discussing, well, what? The weather? Last night’s episode of Space Eastenders? I know the Vulcan’s are known for their logic, but come on.

– It somehow makes teleportation guns boring, by marking out exactly where you can shoot your partner, then having to wait before he ‘shoots’ you onto the same pad.

I could go on, but I won’t. It’s terrible, but not even fun terrible. That’s all you need to know.