I decided to revisit a number of id Tech 3 engine games recently since one of my all time favs is American McGee's Alice. I was surprised to see a Star Trek game on the engine - and produced by Raven Software, no less! So, I watched a few episodes of Star Trek to become familiar with the universe and then dived into the game. While I do appreciate that they captured the feel of the show (which I still can't honestly say I've ever cared for), the game has just been a boring slog for the first hour or so. In that regard, it feels just like Star Trek to me. If you're already a Trekkie, you'll gush over this game regardless of its faults. If you're just someone looking for a hidden gem, bygone FPS, I'd move along to something else instead.
The combat and movement are good enough to carry the game. However, the lack of interesting map designs and boring repetitiveness of activities make the game fall flat by the half-way mark. A good effort that I would like to see improved in the next project that's hopefully not a sequel.
I remember loving this game when it came out. I went to replay with my copy on Steam and holy Moses is it TERRIBLE. I don't remember the camera being so bad, but most of the camera control options in the options menu don't even seem to work properly regardless of which mode was chosen. There are worse bugs in the opening hour than I remember throughout my whole playthrough back in 2007 (the mage in the opening village sent me off on an unfinishable quest because apparently I had a character die in the intro, but never found out until 30 minutes later?) I have over 80 hours logged on Steam between the original campaign and Mask of the Betrayer, but could not stand the horrid AI and controls in the Platinum edition. I feel like something got changed with a patch during one of the expansions and just made everything worse. Although now that I think about it, I remember beating MotB and the game crashing on the deathblow to the final boss - so I never actually got to see the ending. 10 years later, I guess that memory makes a lot more sense to me now, thinking I wanted to replay this game.
Your character attacks slow as tar, even with fast weapons. Meanwhile, some bosses are attacking basically as fast as your dodge recovery. Total mismatch of game type and game play. Great character designs, though. There doesn't seem to be RPG stat progression so far (couple of bosses in), so the boss fights seem like these fights of attrition where you're just wailing on them for far too long after you figure out that pattern. And they'll sometimes kill you in a few hits - or their status effects will randomly while you're trying to dodge a follow-up attack. Feels artificially 'hard.' I'm just going to go back and play Metroid, Iconoclasts, and Hollow Knight.
The previous game was fine as a top down shooter with Dead Space vibes to it. This game doesn't maintain the momentum from the ending there and additionally starts adding in fixes camera angles. This choice was absolutely wrong and kind of ruins the initial experience to the point that I stopped playing it. I'm not even sure I'll move on to part 3. Glad to have gotten the trilogy in a giveaway.
I played a Dark Urge Barbarian and couldn't immediately kill the guy with a knife to my throat after the intro. Lame writing, stupid scenario, performance issues, bloated installer - it's like Larian did everything they could wrong. Oh, except pay off Geoff Keighley! GOTY 2023! LMFAO The only thing that went right was my friend letting me use his GoG installer to try it out before I blindly purchased for bandwagoning reasons. I'll stick with the older NWN and IE games, I guess.
The games all look nicer, but still play the hind end of a hippo. Also, there's censorship when it was advertised that there wouldn't be any censorship. AVOID!
They try to have a story, but the first four or five missions are absolutely uninteresting. I know they tried to remake several of the levels from Codename 47, but I don't think I got to any of them yet. It's just the new missions that are mind-numbingly bad. I don't know how they go from an absolute gem like H2:SA to this. Easily the worst classic Hitman game (so probably at least as bad as the always-online ones starting in 2016). As unrefined as Codename 47 is, I'd rather play that again than try Contracts ever again.
I used to defend this entry until I replayed it recently. Enemies having eyes in the back on their heads when changing items in your hands is broken. Also, some of the levels are simply too long without having mid-level saves unless you die and need to use another life. I decided to call it quits after the Lee Hong Assassination and then got dumped in Colombia, which is a run around an empty map simulator. The game playing more like a bad third person shooter instead of Hitman 2: Silent Assassin and afterward also works against it for replays. It's enjoyable to see where the series started, but I simply can't recommend when it feels like a waste of time beyond seeing what it was like back in the year 2000. FWIW, I had good luck running on Linux with dgVoodoo drop-ins.
