Reviews// Star Trek

It doesn't help that, putting the design issues to one side, the game is kind of ugly. Not horribly minging, but certainly way below what you'd expect of a big budget game. Textures are awful, lip-synching's all over the place and it's entirely possible to have Kirk and Spock stood on the exact same spot looking like the two-headed victim of a teleporter accident.

Of course, second rate use of the IP and poor visuals could been rescued by excellent mechanics. No luck there, though. The cover system's unweildly, which is an immediate black mark against a cover-based shooter. You can just about get it to do what you want, but it's stodgy and after a little while you realise you can get by without it.

There's a little more variation in weapons than you might expect having watched some Star Trek, but since they're largely energy weapons and you don't see much damage the range feels a bit neither here nor there. Similarly (at the risk of sounding racist) after a while all space dinosaurs start to look the same.

Climbing sections are pulled straight out of Uncharted and are linear and unchallenging enough that they feel irrelevant. Puzzling sections just involve remembering to use your tricorder (which performs a lot like Batman's 'detective vision') to follow power lines around and are more ways of making you traverse the level than they are actual mental challenges.

Then there's the co-op. The co-op play was supposed to be lynchpin of the whole game. This is what it's about, apparently. The relationship between Kirk and Spock. Co-op treats include getting to open doors together, getting a boost to hard-to-reach places and doing mini-games together. Plus there's another character on screen with you at all times. Yes, it's that innovative.

You can do it either on- or offline. If you do it offline, however, you could be in for a spot of confusion. There's no drop-in/drop-out local co-op. There's also no 'Co-op' or 'multiplayer' option on the main menu. After a great deal of staring at the screen in dumb disbelief I eventually discovered that the way to get a second local player into the mix is to go through the 'chapters' menu option or, probably, select 'new game'. I didn't dare do that because it told me my existing save would be overwritten. Frankly, I felt a bit angsty about going into the 'chapters' option as I was told the same thing, but by that point I'd come to the realisation that I had no choice if I wanted to sample local co-op for this review.

It didn't really matter, as having another real player with me didn't make a lot of difference. Whatever positive impact playing co-op had was derived from the fact that the AI can't be trusted to guide your companion somewhere useful if left to its own devices. You constantly have to issue commands to make your artificial friend keep up, and it's really annoying.

Having a real player on screen with you certainly doesn't bring the game to life, though. At best it means you have someone to complain to when the game does something boring or stupid.

In a nutshell, Star Trek utterly fails to convey any of the excitement of the JJ Abrams reboot. It fails to do anything interesting design-wise or story-wise. It treads a very well-worn genre path and fails to do much with any of the conventions it employs. It feels like Uncharted- or Gears of War-lite, but fails to draw any fun from the mechanics it borrows.

Pros:
+ Has a feeling of authenticity
+ Fan service delivers the odd cool moment

Cons:
- Falls into the pit of lifeless tie-in despair
- Dreary script
- Poorly-executed game mechanics
- Useless co-op mode

SPOnG Score: 4/10