Star Trek
Overview -
Looking to cash in on the release of Star Trek: Into Darkness, publisher Namco Bandai Games and developer Digital Extremes teamed up to produce a Star Trek game that's designed to bridge the story gap between 2009's Star Trek and the new film. Basically, the Enterprise and crew have an encounter with the Gorn that have appeared from a rip in space near New Vulcan. The two sides clash over a Federation device called the Helios and end up in a battle for power. All of these events take place prior to the opening scene in Star Trek: Into Darkness where the Enterprise is visiting planet Nibiru.
Video Review
Easily the most distracting aspect of the visuals, lip-syncing is laughably poor in Star Trek. Words simply aren't synced up to the mouths of the characters that are speaking, thus the cutscenes look absolutely ridiculous. In addition, the developer skimped on the facial animations of all other characters in the game beyond the main cast. Beyond that, character animations are quite stiff and there's an insane amount of clipping issues with wandering around the environment.
Camera angles can be a pain to manage, particularly in co-op. There are certain points in the game where you can swing the camera around to the point where you are staring through the body of Spock or Kirk. However, there's not much to look at on alien ships. While the Enterprise looks fairly polished, the remainder of the levels start to get extremely repetitive and bland. You will notice level textures are reused over and over around two to three hours into the game. Sadly, all the lens flare in the world can't hide the poor design choices. Level design is also extremely linear; much of the action takes place in a series of corridors.
Audio Review
This may be the only praiseworthy point of the game. All the characters within the game are voiced by their on-screen counterparts; Chris Pine is Kirk, Zachery Quinto is Spock, Simon Pegg is Scotty and so on. Spock's voice works particularly well, only because his monotone, emotionless delivery works with the silted line delivery. It's as if all the lines were recorded separately and the audio designers simply pieced them together as if no one would notice the difference. Beyond the voice work, the music matches the new franchise and the sound effects are fairly on point with devices and weapons in the Star Wars universe.
The biggest problem of this game is that it's simply not entertaining, even to a diehard Trekkie. The presentation is dull, the visuals are horrific and the gameplay feels broken and tedious most of the time. There's really no amount of money that you should spend on this game on any platform. Avoid it at all costs and hope the next developer takes the Star Trek universe more seriously.
