The introductory movie, very much like an episode's title credits.

The primary plot starts in the middle of the final episode of Voyager with the ship trapped in a Borg Sphere riding out the transwarp conduit to the Alpha Quadrant. As Alexander Munro you and your team are briefed with infiltrating the cube and shutting down the dampening field trapping the ship. Naturally there are a few bumps along the way with the Borg none too happy about what you are trying to do. Prevailing here you then return to Starfleet headquarters where your team is broken up and reassigned around the galaxy to other postings. That is till you catch the eye of one particularly famous captain who sees the value in the team you and Tuvok had crafted.

Reassigned to the USS 'Enterprise' you quickly begin to put the team back together, just in time for it to help with the investigation as to the fate of the USS 'Dallas'. Something has ravaged the ship with the only warning given that all other Federation ships should stay away. Investigation of this ship's fate leads you on a merry chase across the Alpha Quadrant as a grand plot that threatens the Federation is uncovered and dealt with. It is a typical Star Trek story and should keep fans of the series fairly happy while they play.

Big, Bad, Borg.
Worse yet - he is all yours to deal with.

We say fairly, because one of the first slip-ups the game makes is getting some rough edges to its Trek lore. While a lot of effort has been put into keeping things well tied-in with the established history and technical jargon of the series there are curious little mistakes that creep in. GPS conduits anyone? Or the curious anomaly of panels in the Voyager training sequence, which starting players work through, having Enterprise ship schematics on them. It is little details like this that will jarr the more knowledgable Trek fan which is a shame as otherwise some very clever and sly references to the series are included. Part of the fun of the story is spotting all the back-story references.

As we said at the begining of the review, the general feeling here at Gameplanet is that this is old-school shooter gaming, given a new lease of life. All the old staples are there complete with movement while in the air, the almost mandatory shotgun a.k.a Federation Assault Rifle, strafe jumping, a bit of rocket jumping, secrets & easter eggs, fluid, fast movement and an ethos of 'if it moves, fix that problem'. What is an update is the shiny new engine with Ritual having done a very nice job on updating and modifying the Quake III engine for the task.

Some of the locales are stunning,
this is Starfleet Academy.

Frankly, the engine looks extremely good and this game is running neck and neck with beautifully executed American McGee's Alice in terms of visual splendor. Character models are all executed well with the main villans of the piece, the Exomorphs, having an appropriately toothy look to them and the more social species are also represented well. There is a distinct harkening back to classic Trek with a healthy contingent of Alien beauties present, not to say that the female players have been left out with a goodly number of well toned males to admire as well. Exactly how Munro gets that Hazard suit quite so form fitting over his abdominal muscles we'll never know.

Enemies don't just fall over when they die,
glowing pyrotechnics is the order of the day!

Weapon effects are well done, with enemies dissolving, vaporising, irradiating into small chunks and dying in all manner of quite spectacular methods. Often the secondary fire method of a weapon provides the most spectacular death animations so a good part of the fun when getting a new weapon is discovering exactly what novel ways it can deal out death. New to the sequel are clips on the weapons which require reloading periodicly. This is a welcome refinement over the first game because it forces a rhythm to combat the first lacked by allowing a 'blaze away till your ammo is gone' style of fighting. Now it becomes quite important to reload at strategic moments when fighting bigger monsters and generally get more involved in your combat. Add to it the fast movement speeds of both enemies and yourself and combat is a joy in itself being classic frenetic FPS.

But it isn't all combat. Elite Force 2 recognises the need for pauses in the slaughter as well upping the ante at moments. So at various times you have 'boss' encounters with particularly large and tough specimens to duel with. Generally these are balanced well with the fights being difficult, but fair. One is a smidgen tough, actually tougher than the final end game boss, but all are possible in a reasonable time-frame at normal difficulty. Giving you a breather after these hectic combat bouts are the intelligence gathering missions which usually involve strolling around sections of the Enterprise interviewing people and making choices that advance the sub-plot. Ritual is to be congratulated on making these interactive and thus giving the player a much needed chance to calm down and reflect a bit on what they just went through. It helps that the ship is fairly well populated with not only secrets to be discovered, but conversations to be overhead.

A cutscene in Stellar Cartography,
where heavenly bodies are admired.

Some of these conversations are hilarious in their own right with other characters having stories of their own advancing through the game. One that had us in stitches was the Botanist's quest to spend some quality holodeck time with the carniverous plantlife native to Andor. If you pay attention there is a variety of discoveries about this quest and the character of the botanist as well. All this serves to make the Enterprise seem like a living ship a bit more with background characters commiserating with over your last mission, pleased to see you or even just telling you to go away. Only the Thief or No One Lives Forever series of games has done this better and it adds greatly to the ambience of the game.

Start of the training level with Tuvok.
Note he is in Voyager uniform while
consoles in this level show Enterprise details.

Ambience is something the game has in spades. Some of the strongest segments of the game are the more exploratory missions, where mood is established well with creative use of scripted events as well as a strong audio engine component that renders all the alien growls you could want with aplomb. The biggest weakness in the long term is that the game is so heavily scripted that replays of the game will be very similar. With that said, however, the extreme number of secrets to find along with the changable sub-plots do provide good reasons for going through the game at least twice just to chase down all the variations. Secrets are worth chasing because they not only provide the odd easter egg surprise or offer a bonus weapon but they sometimes contain collectable little golden starship models. Collect enough of these models and a Secrets menu gradually unlocks allowing you to access a variety of bonus maps to play through. On top of that, some of the secrets themselves take you to bonus maps directly -- with some players reporting a secret Mario platform level and an "attack of the boxes" level, amongst others. It is a nice touch and adds a considerable incentive to find these.

Tricorder puzzle time.
Here you have to synchronise frequencies.

As if this wasn't enough, there is also a multi-player mode available providing classic deathmatch, team fortress style play and one or two variations on tag modes to try out. Because most of the weapons are hit scan with smallish splash radiuses this is very much a mode of play dominated players with a good connection. Good for a bash at a LAN party, but we really don't see this as tearing people away from the bigger multi-player games out there. It is a nice addition but in some ways I wish Ritual had ignored the multi-player and worked a bit more on the single player mode to get rid of those slight rough edges.

The worst of these rough edges has to be in the overly obvious constraining the level designers have done with various maps. When you have a game that actively is encouraging exploration to find secrets then it is simply wrong to have chunks of the maps lopped off by the very lame invisible wall trick. This is perhaps my biggest complaint with the otherwise superlative level design. Generally the design and texture work is a delight to behold but those invisible blocks crop up in the strangest of places and, worse yet, are inconsistant. Some stop you from falling into dangerous spaces while other segments of the same level will let you fall in if you so wish. It makes trying to figure out if a spot is unreachable, and thus not a secret hiding place, quite difficult as you are never too sure what is stopping you.

A secret easter egg. Exactly why
the monkey is not amused is unclear.

Some levels do have a neat twist about them, with one or two featuring chase sequences, the odd infiltration by stealth, manning a phaser cannon to defend the ship and other non-traditional ideas to spice things up. Sadly, one of those things is the occasional inclusion of a jumping puzzle. One segment in particular is bad for this, with energy bridges being a common theme. We at Gameplanet would like game designers to recognise that, no matter how you dress them up, jumping puzzles are simply horrible in FPS games. With no real sense of where your feet are to time jumps these invariably become exercises in pain. Elite Force 2 does manage to keep these to a healthy minimum but they are still there and can cause occasional bouts of grumpiness as a result.

Also helping to break up the combat, the game takes the Tricorder and makes it an integral part of gameplay. By default it gives you a more detailed radar screen placing enemies around you but it also has altered scanning modes. Structural Integrity mode is one you will use a lot because it is very useful for finding secrets as it highlights destructable segments of the terrain. Trace gas mode is very useful for locating hard-to-find gas pockets or sources of gas and the Bio-scan mode is a little oddly named as it helps you find bio-scanners rather than finding lifesigns, as the name would suggest. It is however invaluable for sneaking past security systems.

Quarterdeck, a multi-player level.
A nice touch is the level is set inside the
model on Picard's desk. That's him looking in now.

Perhaps the two most novel uses of the Tricorder is both a puzzle solver and a weapon. Puzzling solving occurs when you use the Tricorder to hack into particularly complicated computer systems and is a very nice nod to System Shock which featured similar mini-games as its hacking interface. The weapon side of it is when, during the final suite of missions, the Tricorder allows you to relay targetting information to allow the orbiting Enterprise to attack structures on the ground. There are few more satifying moments than surprising a pesky sniper with a solid round of starship phaser fire and a volley of Quantum torpedos.

Mission briefing screen.
At least you have something to read while it loads.