Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force (Demo)

Set Phasers to FAG.

In a nutshell:

Josh: Most of the Star Trek franchise is simply made of games used to cash in on the Star Trek franchise, and just really suck. I reviewed Starfleet Command because it was actually a nice game. But this is something else.

Pros:

Josh says: This might only be a demo, and the full game might be just jumping puzzles out the ass, but what a fuckfantastic demo! Scripted sequences like crazy, using the Q3 engine for an SP game. They even let you wander around some of Voyager in the second part of the demo.

Obviously, I have to compare this to Half Life. Compared to Half Life, this game just has better graphics, but it's about 1000x better than anything that's EVER FUCKING EVER come out of id, other than perhaps Deus Eckts. Even the weapon models are really good.

John: I didn't think I would, especially since it's based off Voyager, and that show just isn't that good, but I ended up loving the demo for this game. It's basically a sort of Star Trek ripoff of Half-Life. Just like Sea Quest was a complete fucking ripoff of Star Trek TNG*, this steals a lot from the basic premise of Half-Life, where you get life and armor based off the fact that you wear a "hazard suit." That right there is pretty blatant, but that doesn't really make the game worse. The rest of the stuff takes place in the Star Trek universe, which means you get to burn through a lot of people with phasers as their streams whine and burn and hiss and kablooey. Personally, watching TNG (I know this gives me extra nerd points), I always thought those phasers would be so cool to really have. Just because it was a bright orange stream of burning destruction, I thought it was one of the coolest fictional weapons I ever saw. Fuck those queer Dune sound guns.

And not only does the normal little hand phaser in this game act just like in the show, but it has infinite ammo (you get 100 ammo points that automatically recharge at a nice speed). There's an alternate fire that will just fucking vaporize any guy you hit, so you can watch them fall to the ground as they turn into dust, fire shooting out of their MOTHERFUCKING EYESOCKETS. So this game really does its best of making me live out my dumbest phaser-carving Star Trek destruction and death fantasies. And that makes it worth buying, for me.

Josh: The mouth-movements are really out of Deus Ex, so I guess this is the Deus Ex engine, not the Q3 engine. But hey, the Deux Ex aiming algorithms are gone. When you fire a weapon, it will always hit the center of the crosshairs, just like Q1234. Which is one of the things that drained the action out of Deus. I never really found a use for guns whe you had to be standing still for 10 seconds just to ensure a hit that would most likely just piss off/alert your enemies.

John: Actually, the mouth movements are just facial sprites and textures. In Deus Ecks, the mouth was actually a bunch of polygons that opened and closed, and matched the mouth movements of what were being spoken accurately. Half-Life did almost the same thing, except the mouth only opened and closed, yet still was a good enough of an effect, and helped revolutionize NPCs in first person shooters (Gabe Newell himself, I believe, said that the guys who created the mouth movements for Half-Life, which had never been done before, were just plain genius).

Josh again: Vaporizing baddies in this game is just spectacular. They burn up, and fire shoots out of them. It's a pretty amazing sight.

Cheats are accepted into the console by default, which is extremely cool.

John: Remember, we're talking about the demo here.

Oh yeah, another thing I loved in this demo was that you get to run around a disaster struck Voyager (again, pretty much like Half-Life), and you see crewmembers working on repairs all over. And you also get the chance to kill at least TWO crewmembers, which I frequently do, and drink in the moment of having another stupid crewmate die a screaming vaporizing death as I lock him in an exploding room with a containment (force) field. Voyager is so stupid. They keep losing crewmates, and even though the introduction to this game says that they have no way of reinforcing lost crewmates, they just keep fucking dying on the show. They would've run out, by now. But I don't watch the show anyway. Blah.

Cons:

Josh: It's an id game based on Q3, so even if you have a massive system, bugs can hurt you. But that's really all I can say.

John: Are you sure it's an id game? >:(!!!!!!!!1111111

Overall:

Josh: For a Star Trek game, this was a pretty damn good demo. So good, I reccommend buying it.

John: ME TOO

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*The name of Sea Quest itself is a ripoff of Star Trek, since the first word is the setting (Sea vs. Star) and the second is the statement of JUST FUCKING GOING SOMEWHERE and doing stuff (Quest vs. Trek). Even the characters were a ripoff of Star Trek: The Next Generation. There was the older, experienced captain, the kid super duper genius, there was a black guy... and then there was some guy with a disability (I think). And then later they added an alien crewmate (ala Worf). I never even watched Sea Quest, but it was such an obvious ripoff, even when I was 13 I could tell. Sea Quest sucked. FUCK THAT QUEERNESS.

Review by:
John Cable

Josh Cable

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