Star Trek™: Voyager - Elite Force

A solid first person shooter experience, lots of point and shoot and a bit of platforming in there too. If you are a fan of the show, its magic to interact with this world. Its about as long as you would expect from an FPS from this era (several hours). I haven't tried the multiplayer. The dialogue can be a bit lame in places, perhaps as a result of its slow delivery due to game scripting realities. But I find it entertaining and adds to the charm of its low polygon count (high back in the day). Despite the characters looking like people wearing life-sized paper cutouts of people on their fronts, the environments are pretty gorgious and varied. If you enjoyed Unreal you'd probably like this one too!

Elite Force was a unique trek game and showcases a change both in Trek and in game design. It's one of the earliest titles using the Quake 3 engine - which shows. Both the geometry and especially the character models seem pretty rough now. The characters especially tend to look and act a bit like puppets from team america - also not only in their looks. In terms of design, elite force dropped the old maze-like levels shooters used to have in the 90s and replaced it with the narratively driven tunnel. You're basically progressing through a given plot, running along through a very beautifully designed tunnel. At certain points you will have an encounter with X enemies beaming in. Then, a cutscene, then another tunnel, another encounter, another cutscene and so on. The great use of voyager itself makes this game stand out. Between missions you will run around on the ship, meet up with some crew members and trigger some dialogues. The addon improves even more on this by giving you a voyager exploration mode to track down some fan goodies and holodeck programmes. The singleplayer plot is set well and ends up like a typical action movie of the era. It's a bit schlocky. Your success or failure can have at least some impact on the game, though not always in a logical way. In my playthrough a very dead team member was suddenly very much alive again because the game's plot demanded that he'd get his dramatic death in that particular mission. The missions itself are pretty cool and try to mix up the scenarios as much as possible. The game is obviously mostly about shooting stuff and there's almost no puzzles involved. Something that I think is mirrored in that time's ST too, actually. The shows became more focused on action, less on mysteries. All in all, Elite Force is a solid FPS experience which felt very fresh at the time.

Very excited to pick this up after all these years. Elite Force was always the best Trek game. I had a mod back them that would use models of the TOS enterprise. I had such good times with that. I might have to locate that again, its been ages. Fantastic game, Thanks GOG

Interesting to read this review of one of the developers @mgummelt You really did well - at the time it was the perfect game for me as a trekkie and FPS fan. How little did I know that these two things fit so perfect together :) Storymode was great - with the original casts voices I felt as I was playing an episode from the series (and a good one too!) And Multiplayer was great too - as an old Q3Arena Fan I felt right at home ;) And being able to explore the Voyager in all its glory was the icing on the cake and a dream come true for 15 year old me. Love it to this day (also its successor). Still plays very well!

I don't know what else I can say that hasn't already been said about this game: good plot - check, great voice acting from the cast - check, good mechanics (considering the engine) - check, variety of levels and good pacing - check and check. What I can reflect on is my own experience when I first played this in the early twothousands. At that point, I have only seen a bit of TNG and all of DS9, but VOY hasn't been shown yet on our local TV stations, so this game (and its manual) was my first introduction to VOY, and I felt that it was something worthwhile right away. Sure, it seemed more shallow than DS9, but it felt more vibrant and with a better ensemble cast than TNG. So, if someone wants to view this from the perspective of an adaptation, I would argue it's one of the best adaptations of a TV Show into a video game, ever. Also, not knowing anything about VOY, the first time I played the Species 8472 missions, it was terrifying, simply because they felt so "alien" (no pun intended) to the Star Trek I knew. The expansion, though, is somewhat of a cash grab in my opinion. Sure, it's nice to walk through the decks of the ship, and the Captain Proton stuff fits into the overall vibe, but it doesn't really offer anything new. I am glad that it's included with the game here, though.