I don't care how the game was perceived then or now. What I care about is how I've been enjoying the game right now and it's definitely a unique and fun experience. The controls are a bit strange but easy to understand. If you don't know how to do something just press F1. It felt pretty intuitive to me. I use arrow keys to move and shoot not the mouse. I like the art style, the explosions, the story they lay out, and how you can interact with the environment. I haven't gotten too far but I barely spent any money on this and I'd say it's worth it especially when it goes on sale. The music is pretty cool too. Sound effects are fine as well.
I really liked this game and would've loved it but there's a lot of small problems that made playing this game less enjoyable than it could've been. First of all, the weapon balance is really terrible. The only guns I have fun using are the shotgun and the rocketlauncher. The assault rifle is good when you get incendiary bullets but that's kind of late into the game. All other weapons feel too inaccurate and too underpowered. Second, the advertised nanopowers are also pretty underpowered and one of the powers in particular, "maximum strength" feels really gimmicky because of how quickly it runs out of energy and how you can't use it in ways you'd expect it to use. Like the game tells you "go destroy this tank" and I didn't find the explosives at first so I tried punching it with maximum strength and it did nothing at all. I thought "oh what if I use maximum strength to jump high and land on top of the tank and try pulling the guys out of there" and that also doesn't work. You can't imagine or get too creative basically. You have to do stuff the way the game tells you a lot of the times. My ideal combination of powers was using maximum speed and cloaking when I lost too much health. But I still wish you could sprint for much longer when using maximum speed. Energy runs out too fast. Speaking of speed, the base movement speed when using maximum armor or maximum strength is really slow and it's even slower when carrying a rocket launcher or other heavy weapon in your hands. Other than balance issues, this game has vehicles for example but you can't have much fun with them usually. The maps are too small for them to make sense and they can get blown up really easily. If the overall map size was as large as GTA San Andreas or something, we could have more fun with vehicles, but usually the player will get into a vehicle and reach his destination in less than 20 seconds or get blown up in that time. Still a pretty fun game though and it deserves respect.
This game is PEAK!!! The boss fights were good (aside from each phase being interrupted by a cutscene but I didn't mind much). There were a lot of weapons and all of them are arguably good, a lot of variation in environments, co-op NPCs rarely got in your way which is an improvement over the first game, you've got a choice in what the protag says and this can actually influence the story, the cutscenes were all fun to watch and felt like an above average Star Trek episode if not a great Star Trek episode or movie, the dialogue as a whole was good , the soundtrack seemed competent if not a bit generic, and even on normal difficulty the game's a genuine challenge. There are also collectibles to collect which unlock secret levels. For 2003 the graphics are BUSSIN! You can also bunny hop pretty easily but I don't recommend doing it unless you've played the game before as that's a good way of getting killed by surprises. There are hacking minigames which are pretty fun unlike Bioshock and this game predates Bioshock by 4 years. The campaign is pretty lengthy in a good way to the point that I thought I had made it to the end of the story but then it hits me with a new twist and extends it at least a couple more hours (I lost track of time so that's a conservative estimate). There is also some Romance and I love it. It's good Romance. You can choose between two darlings and they're both wonderful. Complaints I've got? Well there's no "Virtual Voyager" mode like in the first game, but then again the first game didn't originally come with that mode until it was added as an expansion pack. This game mostly takes place on the Enterprise anyways and I guess due to the movie events (I didn't watch the Next Generation movies) most of the iconic staff like Riker, Data, La Forge, etc. aren't there anyways so it's all good in the hood. Also this game doesn't play nice on modern systems, had to whip out Windows XP for it, but I won't hold it against it.
