I'm a huge fan of the source material and the original game, and this one checked nearly all the boxes for me! It took longer than I expected to complete all the side missions, so expect over 30 hours of playtime if you're a completionist. It was worth the journey! It's probably for the best that GOG left out the multiplayer for whatever reason. In its original realase, after you advanced several levels in MP it became horribly broken by modders/cheaters/hackers who modified their save files to create near-invincible orcs to defend their fortresses. Unfortunately Monolith/WB never seemed to be interested in fixing that problem. Maybe in a few years there will be a community mod to restore MP when people who are still interested in the game will play honesty. There's still tons of fun to be had with SP and you can raid several fortresses still there. I ended up playing MP while it was still online until I got to the tiers of MP fortresses with 100% cheated orcs, at which point I figured I had "beaten" the MP! Probably not fair, but I'm only giving 3/5 stars because of how much emphasis Monolith and WB put on MP when this game came out, only to abandon the title after what seemed like less than a year, having never patched-out the cheated orcs problem which sprung up almost immediately. I bet this title would have had massive replayability, comparable to communities like R6 Vegas, etc if they had fixed that cheating issue.
The first game is honestly one of my top 5 games of all time. I tried really hard to like this sequel, especially with Patrick Stewart's voice talent, a longer campaign, and the Enterprise-E. I've replayed it at least 4 times since its release but just couldn't learn to appreciate it like EF1. What I came to remember about each game was the sum of its parts. Neither had anything particular going for it, and each had its flaws, but when considering all the factors, this sequel left me disappointed overall. Whereas EF1 1 had tight gunplay and very responsive controls as I'd expect from an Quake 3 engine game, EF 2's weapons felt a bit "loose" when firing them; Small things like in EF1 when the phaser fired immediately on a mouse click, then quickly change to a low-power mode when it's empty are gone. Modifying settings and cfg files didn't change this; it's part of the design. Other guns in EF2 also felt like fanfiction (even when considering the Photon launcher). I was thrilled to see the bat'leth Klingon weapon, but it's underutilized and janky to use. Some other design decisions like eliminating the one-shot vaporize mode on the compression rifle and removing zoom as a general hud capability weren't fun. EF1 had amazing background/atmospheric music that felt appropriate for the setting, with suspense and tone that felt comparable to the TV series. EF2's background music sounds generic and cheap by comparison. Not all the voice actors came back from EF1 unfortunately, and at least 1 returning major character (Chell, who was voiced by the original Voyager actor) had a very different sounding voice actor. EF1's campaign was short by expectations back then and today too, but I thought it was memorable and well crafted, like a high-quality Voyager episode. EF2's campaign for me was entirely forgettable. Again, I tried really hard to like this one for many years, but the sum of its parts make it unenjoyable compared to replaying the EF1 campaign and mods.
