I played it towards the middle of June, but kind of put off reviewing it and posting in general as usual.
The Story
Starfleet decided to build an aircraft carrier, even though technically a couple of ships they already have could serve as one and probably do a better job. So to up the ante they also made their aircraft carrier “a mobile outpost”, whatever that means. It’s not particularly big- it’s half the size of the average capital ship Starfleet used (it’s about the size of America’s second and third aircraft carriers, commissioned in 1927, though while those could carry 78 contemporary aircraft the Typhon can only carry 26 starfighters. You never see that many in the game though…). Your “mobile outpost” is deployed to a small section of the galaxy that oddly looks like a galaxy of its own and must chase away four foreign powers plus some space creatures trespassing on Federation turf.
It’s ironic that you are here enforcing the Federation’s borders when a mere 22 years after this game came out (and about that many years in-universe after this game takes place) we would learn that the Federation thinks having a border is racist, but there you go (then again, that whole story arc in the 2nd season of Star Trek: Picard started with a fleet of warships being assembled to murder border crossers and the butcherers were supposed to be the GOOD GUYS, so that show’s messaging is all over the place. But it was written by the same people who repeatedly voted for kids to be put in cages, voted for the humanitarian disaster at the southern border, voted against someone who prevented crises like this, then lied about border agents brutalizing illegals and tried to hide that there was a crisis, and now are building the very border wall they said was racist, so I guess really it’d be a surprise if the messaging WAS consistent from these hypocrites.).
Also, if you thought Voyager made the Borg look weak, wait’ll you play this!
The Game
You fly one of several fighters in this space dogfight simulation. For those Star Trek fans out there who watched the new Top Gun this year and were like “I wanna do that with Worf giving me the orders” then this is the game for you. In later stages you begin having a variety of fighters to choose from, each with unique weapons. There are secret weapons you can pickup by doing random things you’d never ever in your life think about doing, and some of these are worth getting. You also have three possible endings, though one of them you won’t see if you beat a certain bonus level early in the game… however, there is a weapon in that level that makes the game easier. You can’t just pickup a weapon and exit a level; you have to beat the level too.
Sometimes you aren’t just shooting stuff. You get to plant mines and tow things too. One particularly frustrating level has you towing a shuttle with a glass keel and paper hull that the enemy shoots lasers at with the striking power of tactical nukes.
Once in a while it shifts from flying your fighter around to manning one of the A.A. batteries on the Typhon. Looks like there’s only two of them on the whole ship, and they never are used when you are flying a fighter, but darn are they powerful! 10 years in-universe before this game took place, a Borg cube went unscratched after 39 starships bigger than yours attacked it. But now your puny little turret singlehandedly scares them away. (I guess they adapted or whatever because in the books a fleet of cubes wipes everyone out, in contemporary video games you need a couple of ships to take out a Borg cube, and in Star Trek: Picard set as I said over 20 years in the future we saw Starfleet send a whole lynch mob to take out just one Borg ship when they stepped on the white-supremacist-ignorant-redneck-Federation’s lawn.)
My Opinion
I played this and Star Wars: Rogue Squadron on the N64 around the same time, so it is of course inevitable that they must be compared. This is like Rogue Squadron on the PlayStation, so you get inferior graphics. Unfortunately your enemies are tougher than TIE Fighters so it takes many hits to knock them out, and they don’t sit around making that easy for you. The Borg are bad with this in particular- they take a lot of hits, have tiny fighters, and one level they show up in has a background so dark it is very hard to find their ships (I had to play it at night, though maybe modern TVs won’t have the issue that my vintage-2001 TV does). Still, it’s not bad or anything, but very violent and the whole “Star Trek” theme is kind of missing as an overarching plot (a minority of the missions sort of go in that direction, but of those most are optional sidequests). You’re not trying to make peace with anyone, you’re not studying anything, you’re not exploring higher moral issues or making social commentary, you’re just shooting anything that moves. If anything, Rogue Squadron had a more Star Trek feel to it because of the Imperial pilot joining you, showing that your enemy isn’t entirely a faceless evil. So I guess this is a good game, but not really a good Star Trek game, just a good game set in that universe. It’s also the only Star Trek game on the PlayStation.
C-Gaymer 