These Aren't The Voyages...

Star Trek: Encounters for PlayStation2 – Reviewed

“Space: the final frontier.
These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange, new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilisations; to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

Familiar words, I think you’ll all agree. You probably thought of them when you heard that Bethesda Softworks and 4J Studios were developing a new PlayStation2-exclusive Star Trek game entitled Star Trek: Encounters. As gaming history has shown us, the opening three sentences of the original television series has provided a rich and diverse base from which to launch flight simulators, action adventures and a whole host of other game types. Encounters, being a space simulator planting the player in direct control of multiple starships, hailing from all five incarnations of Star Trek, would be stacked to the rafters with new life, new civilisations and the chance to boldly meet and greet them all. The life of a starship captain on your Sony home console.

Far from it. In fact, if you were to take Encounters at face value and use it to sum up what Star Trek is all about, William Shatner’s famous introduction would have gone a little something like this…

“Space: the final warzone.
These are the battles of the Warship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to locate strange, new worlds; to seek out the life forms and civilisations that live there; to boldly blast them into tiny pieces of debris.”

Because that’s what this game is all about. There is no button marked “hailing frequencies” on the controller, no chance to ask why the Romulans have violated the Neutral Zone and started to spy on Federation Starbases. No, instead you’re sent into the middle of the Romulan base and ordered to lock phasers. It makes no difference that you’re supposedly doing this as Captain Jean-Luc Picard aboard the Enterprise-D, the star of the late-80’s The Next Generation which was all about peaceful negotiation and conflict resolution. You’ve got a very large Galaxy-Class Starship, your photon torpedoes are loaded and the Romulans aren’t happy to see you: go figure.

This is both the curse and genius of Encounters. As a fan of the television show, I can see how this game would annoy people. The spirit of Star Trek, the boldly going where no one has gone before, is replaced with massive space battles and stealth infiltration missions. The missions themselves, introduced by the bass tones of William “The Shat” Shatner himself, are broken down into the five eras (starting with Star Trek: Enterprise and going all the way through past Star Trek: Voyager to the latest films aboard the Enterprise-E) and have basic plots that don’t fit with continuity. The final mission opens a gigantic rift which sees all enemies from the Xindi to the Borg emerge and fight all five generations of Starfleet captain: Archer, Kirk, Picard, Sisko and Janeway all fight alongside one another in their respective ships. How? Don’t ask. There isn’t an answer.

The genius, however, is that this game makes Star Trek simply great fun. The PC-based games in the series are usually long, time-consuming and involving affairs, which is fine in its own right. They ask things like “distribute power to the nearest 0.5% between all two-hundred and eighty different ship systems”. Screw that: the closest Encounters gets to that is a simple system on the D-Pad which offers the chance to make engines or shields stronger at the expense of power to the sensors or weapons. Depending on your mission objective, re-assign power accordingly with one tap of one button. Job done, and you can continue vaporising rubber-faced aliens.

The weapon system of each starship is pretty much uniform across the board, and with over twenty different ships unlockable for the mini-games, this is helpful. Your right Analogue Stick controls a 360-Degree “target slice” which you can sweep around your starship to scan with. This often picks up warp trails during seek-and-destroy missions and, more importantly, allows you to gain a sensor lock on enemy craft. Depending on how long you hold down the sensor lock button (R2), you can target different components of an enemy vessel. You can even use the transporter in combat. For example: you need to capture a renegade Klingon Vor’Cha attack ship, so you target their engines and weapons, disable them, and are free to beam an Away Team over. Some ships logically have blind spots in their “target slice”, such as the NX-Class, which only has forward and rear mounted phase cannons in the television show. In the technical aspect at least, then, Encounters is loyal to the source material.

Some starships handle differently than others. Often it feels like you’re not in space but driving on ice (not a difficult leap to make, since the action plays out on a pretty-much flat surface, with the option to raise or lower your vessel by about one hundred meters in order to avoid asteroids and torpedoes). The change when playing through the Episode missions from Intrepid-Class Voyager to Sovereign-Class Enterprise-E is sharply noticeable: from quick, nippy and skittish to slow, graceful and imposing. Each mission map, however, seems tailored to suit the pre-assigned starship. There are a few features used in several different missions, including “warp gates” to propel your tiny ship past the speed of light (these never happened on telly, either) and towing objectives (which can get very slightly annoying when the antimatter you’re towing blows you up for the fifth time).

The Episode missions are fun, immersive and take between ten and twenty minutes to clear, and provide the main meat of Encounters. The vegetables around the side, far from being tacked-on extras, are where the real drop-in-and-out arcade-style thrills are to be found. Skirmish, Onslaught and Battle-Fest modes can be played alone or with a willing friend (although since I’m the only one who likes Star Trek in my flat, my friend needed to have his arm twisted… literally…) and provide either quick, entertaining blasts or lengthy dogfights. Choose either a standalone starship for a basic deathmatch, a fleet of three specific ships for a “last man standing” bout, or a co-operative effort to last as long as possible against an endless surge of hostiles. Can you beat Wave 99 (I’ve got a theory that if you beat Wave 99 the PlayStation2 de-materialises under the strain)? Oh, and the visuals? Gorgeous.

Unlockable arenas, starships and Character Cards that boost the systems of each generation put the icing on what is a genuinely thrilling cake. Bethesda Softworks are behind the forthcoming Star Trek: Legacy with all it’s depth and micromanagement, so if this sounds all too simple for you, that’s fine: they’ll get you one way or another. Technically, Encounters is a great game. The controls, while challenging at first, are unique and dynamic. The explosions and special effects come thick and fast, and the ships are big, armed to the teeth with various kinds of death.

The only question remains: if you’re a Star Trek fan, can you live with such a blatant piss-into-the-wind take on the franchise? Will Shatner bowl you over with his reading of a nonsensical script? Will you be ready to accept the utterly ludicrous (even by Trek standards) final mission?

“To boldly go where no one has gone before”, or “to boldly blast them into tiny pieces of debris”?

Graphics:
- Ships break apart quite nicely, and the backdrops are breathtaking.
- Shame they can’t paint the names and numbers on the front of the ships, though.
Sound:
- Some brilliant, atmospheric music, and then there’s always the Shat himself.
- Attempts at different phaser sounds for each ship seem to be forgotten at the end.
Gameplay:
- Endless battles, lightly dusted with stealth and a few races, are great fun.
- If you don’t like the controls, all you’ll do is moan.
Value for Money:
- The multiplayer will last forever, and there is a lot to do (and blow up).
- The twenty-one Episode missions can be beaten in twelve hours.

Overall Score
NINE OUT OF TEN