Otherwise known as Star Trek Troopers. I played this back in June and wrote this around then, but held it back until a little after the midterms because I assumed I’d be doing some political content. This’ll get ya through Thanksgiving anyway.
Non-Sequitur, but I think Species 8472 look like a race of mutant Mewtwos. Maybe the legendary Mewthree? I say Mewtwo is more adorable than 8472- just a big ol’ grumpy kitty.
The Story
Your starship was transported into an alternate dimension, its power is being drained, and this is totally not related to the plot of “The Void” which is the same thing but probably was made a few weeks after this game. While in the void, you must fight other folks who were sucked into it and the creators of said void.
You play as a member of the Federation Starship Voyager‘s designated fighting team for places outside the ship. Given that normally there’s a detachment of Marines on ships for this kind of thing, I guess this makes you a Space Marine. Unlike other Space Marines in video games who load a ton of weapons on their backs, this game actually gives a logical explanation using existing technology from the Star Trek universe for why your character doesn’t appear to have a ton of weapons and isn’t weighed down by all of them yet still has access to all of them in combat. This automatically boosts it a couple of points in my view.
The Game
It’s a first-person shooter using the Quake engine. It took me 19 years or more to beat it legitimately, based on an old save file on my memory card that showed it took me almost 9 hours to reach a spot that this time around it took me less than 4. Maybe the improvement has something to do with the fact that leading up to this I played all the Doom FPS games and only finished playing the add-ons for Doom Eternal a few weeks prior. Some of the same strategies apply, in fact this game even has its own version of Doom 2016’s/Doom Eternal’s Hell Knights except most of the time you fight them they don’t have the space to jump and they have projectiles.
The Bad
The graphics are… well, it is 2001. For the in-game people, it’s like if someone tried to upgrade GoldenEye 64 for the PS2. Not a far trip between the two. The graphics for the stages were pretty good, though once in a while they’d glitch up on you.
Speaking of glitching up, it DOES NOT like skipping cutscenes. In the final boss battle I skipped a cutscene and it kept freezing me in place long enough to take a hit, but that was still better than the first time I skipped the cutscene which led to the entire game freezing. It does like to freeze, at one point I had only played it for like 6 hours according to the save menu and yet it must’ve frozen 3 or more times in that short period of play. One time it even froze in the middle of a battle while the controller still had the “vibrate” command coming to it, so the controller just kept rumbling even a few seconds after I restarted the system.
Now we come to one other thing- framerate. It runs nice and smooth when there aren’t that many enemies, but there are sections where you get swarmed like in Doom 2016/Doom Eternal (or Doom 2 Map 10). Then the framerate drops to where it’s hard to aim and move. It goes from the framerate on the smooth PC Doom to the framerate on Doom 3DO. Luckily it’s usually not long, all you need to do is kill a few enemies and unlike in the Doom games that I mentioned previously as having framerate issues the level design has nothing to do with it. It’s just too many enemies running around.
The Good
The environments are pretty good, and there are some I’d have loved to see more of or spend more time in (namely the original Enterprise-lookin’ areas and Voyager itself). Disappointingly one of those wasn’t available on multiplayer, but there is a map for Voyager in multiplayer for you to run around with some friends trying to kill each other.
Multiplayer is another high point on this one. You just need your one console to do split screen… and a big enough TV which is no problem now but back 19-20 years ago when I first got this it was.
They actually got the main cast for Voyager to come in and do the voices, and even had some minor characters from the series reappear- and voiced by the same actors. Pretty cool! And the voice acting was actually good, everyone seemed to be taking it seriously.
The story as well was good, it felt a little Star Trekky. You meet aliens that start hostile but turn out friendly, you try to reason with enemies sometimes. While you shoot everything that moves, there’s always an explanation like either a misunderstanding or the enemy ignoring friendly overtures, and in some cases shooting it out is not even the preferred method of advancing through the game. Contrast that with Star Trek: Invasion where the Star Trekky stuff is pretty limited, where almost all of the game is just blowing stuff up while making sure your own stuff doesn’t get blown up- a story set in the Star Trek universe rather than a Star Trek story.
My Opinion
I liked it. It’s too long and involved to be more than once every several years, but it’s good. And did I forget to mention that it’s the only “Star Trek Voyager” video game? So that combined with how well done it was should be a major selling point… to someone somewhere I’m sure.
I should probably try the PC version; the graphics look better. I doubt it has the framerate issues and some glitches this version had. The PC version and the PS2 version are about the same price as of this writing for the disc alone, but you might need a CD key and might have trouble running something made for Windows 98 on modern hardware (I’ve tried running some contemporary games in “compatibility mode” on modern hardware, but had lousy results) so I’d say the PS2 version would be easier to get going.
C-Gaymer 
