Star Trek - Shattered Universe

Getting George Takei back behind a microphone to play Hikaru Sulu as a man stranded among his own evil counterparts is the sort of idea that sounds better in a pitch meeting than it plays on a controller. Walter Koenig turns up too, snarling as the Terran Empire's Chekov. The voice work is the most authentically Trek thing here, and it sits on top of an arcade space shooter that has very little to do with the deliberate, broadside-trading rhythm most Star Trek games of the era chased.

Starsphere Interactive's design puts Sulu in small craft rather than on a bridge. You fly shuttles and fighters out of the ISS Excelsior across a long run of missions, shooting down waves of enemies, escorting friendlies, running strafing passes on capital ships and the occasional installation. Phasers and photon torpedoes are mapped to two buttons, shields can be shunted around, and targeting is generous to the point of being automatic. Nothing about the flight model resists you. That is a problem, because there is not much underneath it either.

The mirror universe premise earns some goodwill. Familiar ship silhouettes in Terran Empire livery, Klingons and Cardassians on unexpected sides, a plot that keeps Sulu trying to work out who he can trust while wearing the wrong insignia. The mission briefings do real work in selling the fiction, and the cutscene-adjacent radio chatter between Takei and Koenig carries scenes that the visuals cannot. Level environments, meanwhile, are mostly empty black with a nebula texture and some asteroid geometry, which was a fair use of the PS2 in 2003 and reads as bare now.

Where it breaks down is repetition. Objectives cycle through the same half-dozen shapes for the length of the campaign, difficulty spikes tend to be about enemy count rather than enemy behaviour, and the escort missions inherit every irritation that made escort missions a punchline. TDK Mediactive shipped it into a crowded licensed market and it was received about as you would guess.

It remains an odd little artifact: a mirror-universe story told through a budget arcade shooter, held together almost entirely by two actors who took the material more seriously than the engine could. Worth an hour for the novelty of hearing Sulu give the order to open fire on Starfleet.