Precisely! It's not often that I feel genuinely compelled to inflict seriously life altering bodily harm on fictional characters, especially those found in Star Trek videogames. I feel such a desire now, however. Mr. Head of Starfleet Academy and the people behind his wretched voice, infuriating dialogue and unfathomably irrational design need to be drug out into a field and made to repeatedly watch Kangaroo Jack while being shot in the crotch with a potato gun. Thankfully, few other moments of
Elite Force II so effortlessly awaken the murderous, primal ape within us all.
Genetics has bred mankind to be a race of killers. Since the earliest of our ancestors learned how to roll boulders onto Mammoths, we've longed to obliterate living things that were not us.
Elite Force II is all about keeping this demon within each and every one of us sinners in-check by indulging it and only it. It's about walking, shooting, whipping out the old tricorder on command, and most importantly, killing things. If you need to seriously think while playing, you're going to seriously need to head back to grammar school and play with the colored blocks.
The first Elite Force, as should be expected given the premise of this sequel, was a strict, down and dirty first-person shooter with little time for pleasantries and a lot of time for the exploding of various extraterrestrials by blasting them in the face with an assortment of particle weapons. Unfortunately for Raven, Activision and ourselves, Elite Force had a few problems: it was a part of the deplorable Voyager fiction; the story was out of control; the game was super, super short; and, it wasn't all that Star Trek.
Elite Force II phasers away three and a half of those problems, though it seems the boys and girls at Ritual perhaps spent a bit too much time being faithful to the original game, when more time should have been placed on being new, fresh and faithful to Star Trek. Will this underlying problem burst the plasma vent and flood the game's aft decks with lethal radiation, thus killing us all? Do I have any idea what I'm talking about or am I just pulling warp conduits out of my behind? Does anyone even care? All this and more answered in a few thousand words...promise.
This game is about as straightforward as they come. Very linear level design with a few branches here and there contradict what we heard the game would be like early in its development. Branches can be good, even if they are few and far between. A lot of these are wholly unfulfilling. Since a game of pure action and nothing else rarely succeeds, and in this piece of fiction would be preposterous, Ritual had to add a few things between the carnage to maintain pacing, keep the game Trek, and step on any potential repetition, while at the same time delivering much sought after longevity. Some of these implementations work, others do not. Branches in mission all invariably lead to dead ends. The only justification for exploration is the acquisition of golden starships, sure to be made useless by imminent hacks. These collectables allow players to unlock stuff like new maps and new maps and possibly new maps. Fun, fun, fun, only finding this crap involves stumbling about in the dark, fondling walls like a tool and gazing through the red-orange haze of a structural integrity vision filter when you'd rather just shoot the hell out of something.
This is not to say the game's second ploy to spice up the action, the tricorder, is of no use or joy. It's kind of like a sex toy. When you need to use it, it's great. When you want to use it, it can be great. When you're forced to use it, it's not so much fun. Knowing I can scan things is cool.
Knowing that scanning is totally useless unless there's preset gas or a broken wall or some traps around is not cool. Throughout normal play, the tricorder's function is so rigid and defined that any fun that may have come from playing the role of the inquisitive, investigative scientist on a search to complete a mission is sapped dry. And why the hell doesn't the radar in the top right corner actually show up on the damned tricorder itself where there's conveniently a nonfunctional radar in its place?
Sounds like a pretty crappy sex toy, huh? Not entirely, even if implementation is drab and its use is tedious, there are some pleasurable ways to handle the thing. Another key to breaking up the monotony of constant action is the game's few mini-games, some directly related to the tricorder. A few times in each mission it will become necessary to meddle with a computer system of some sort, which involves playing a small game of match the wavelength modulation or connect the pipe looking circuits. Neither is a full game in and of itself, but both compliment the action and help drop players deeper into the role. From their inclusion a question surfaces... Why not have more? More interactive door hacking of different kinds, more computer hacking, more file retrieval? Ritual had a good thing in this regard with Sin and this next-generation of shooter could have and should have been much more, even given as cool as it already is.
So now that you basically know what spruces up the killing, what's the killing like? Neat. The large swamp crickets combust nicely. The story, played out by some rather tedious cutscenes and a predictable assortment of lifeless but intentionally diverse characters, is strong enough and long enough to be engrossing. It gets pretty good and ultimately introduces some interesting concepts, dropping the Enterprise into precarious but never truly outlandish circumstances (we need to stop this giant blob from destroying the universe with its mutated eggs or whatever the hell the first was about). I attribute this engrossment more to the action and atmospheric work and the design itself than to the writing. Sure, scripting is pretty solid, so if you don't help someone or save someone, you'll have an immediately different effect, but not a lasting one that will have any real implications on the gameplay.
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