Star Trek - Voyager - Elite Force

The premise had to solve a problem no other Star Trek game faced: how do you build a corridor shooter inside a franchise whose heroes talk their way out of fights? The answer was the Hazard Team, a marine unit Tuvok assembles aboard Voyager for situations phasers-on-stun cannot cover, and Ensign Alexander Munro, a low-ranking nobody who exists so the player is never asked to be Janeway. It is a transparent bit of scaffolding. It also works, because it lets the ship stay in character while you clear rooms.

Raven built the original on the Quake III engine, and the DNA shows in the movement and the hitscan snap of the weapons. What separates it from the shooters it shares a codebase with is the arsenal's fidelity to canon. The compression rifle behaves like a rifle; the tricorder is a genuine tool for scanning and repair rather than a prop; and the I-MOD, the Infinity Modulator, is a small piece of design cleverness that turns the Borg's defining trait into a weapon gimmick. Drones adapt to whatever hits them, so you carry a gun that reshuffles its frequency every shot. Trek trivia converted into a firing mechanic.

The PS2 conversion arrived a year after the PC release, handled by Pipe Dream and published by Majesco, and it carries the single-player campaign plus the extra Hazard Team material. What it does not carry well is the pace. Dual-stick aiming on the DualShock 2 was still a young convention in 2001, and the port's sensitivity and framerate make the Etherian and Klingon encounters scrappier than they were with a mouse. Textures were thinned. Load pauses interrupt.

What holds up is the writing and the voice work. Mulgrew, Picardo, Ryan and most of the television cast recorded their parts, and the holodeck training sequences and between-mission wandering around Voyager give the game a genuine sense of place that few licensed shooters of the period bothered with. You can walk the corridors, talk to crew, get scolded. The scavenger graveyard where the ship is trapped is a good idea, too, a junkyard of derelicts from a dozen species that justifies the enemy variety without hand-waving.

As a shooter it is competent and dated; as a piece of Voyager it is better than the show's final seasons managed. Play it for the ship, not the gunfights.