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EVEN MORE SO THAN sequels, expansion packs are often a way for games companies to build on the success of one game and make a quick buck by selling nearly the same game to the people who bought the original. Just looking at the feature list for the Elite Force Expansion would suggest this may be the case here.
Elite Force was a great game. Raven took the Quake III engine and built a Star Trek-themed first-person shooter, described by many as the best Trek game ever. The game depicted the player as Alexander (or Alexandria) Munro, leader of the newly formed Hazard Team on Voyager, tasked with training for and handling the many dangerous situations the ship and crew frequently encounter in the Delta Quadrant. Elite Force's main weakpoint was just the short length of the single player story. We want more!
So you'd think an expansion pack would be a great idea; it could really expand on the original game, adding new missions to finally put those criticisms to rest. But that's not what Raven has done.
The main new feature in the Elite Force Expansion Pack is a new mode called "Virtual Voyager". This is not even as interesting as it sounds. Although you have a certain amount of freedom to walk around the corridors of Voyager, and use the turbolifts to explore 10 of the ship's decks, there is not a lot you can actually do. Most of the doors in the ship are still firmly shut; there are just a few key rooms (mess hall, bridge, sickbay, crew quarters for all the major characters, etc.) which have been modelled that you can enter. Really, the model Voyager here is not a lot more detailed than that in the original Elite Force.
In Virtual Voyager mode you are given several objectives to complete -- visiting certain rooms and collecting objects. Along the way you can read the personal logs of most of the major characters, wave your tricorder at objects to see their name and dimensions, and use the ship's replicators to produce random articles of food and drink. One of the objectives is to launch a shuttle craft, which consists of pushing a few buttons and watching it fly out the bay doors. On the bridge you can engage Red Alert (which causes Captain Janeway to emerge from her ready room and complain at you) or start the Auto Destruct sequence (which causes you and everyone else on board to be killed). |