Star Trek Review

Often you’ll be given an alternate mission objective that informs you of the opportunity to receive a commendation. This usually equates to using stun attacks rather than shooting to kill, but the commendation confers no bonus other than completion percentage. The system is also somewhat broken in some areas. One objective was to find a hidden route into an area and remain undetected, but this can trigger after you’ve cleared the room and backtracked slightly to find it. It undermines the entire objective’s existence

Little faults like this permeate through the entire game experience. Guidance arrows showing you where to go can bug out and not register you’ve walked past, leaving you moving forward through one and keeping it in place as you complete the entire level without direct indication of where to go next. Checkpoints are far between and can be on the wrong side of unskippable cutscenes. There’s a strange EXP system that will let you buy any of three abilities in a certain area, but only ever let you equip one (rather than, say, incrementally making the skill better)


There’s no ability to swim directly up during an underwater section, so you can be right at the end of your air limit and corkscrewing around trying to gain the immediately necessary height. There’s a hacking mini-game that uses your Tricorder to open doors. It’s simple, but as it’s controlled with the same button that makes your character jump and this can sometimes knock you out of the menu entirely. This would be a bigger fault if you were ever required to do it, but if you’ve managed to clear away any danger you can get your co-op partner to complete it by sending them over in your place.


When the pair interact with each other in animations, usually when the pair of starfleet officers boost each other up ledges, it’s ridiculous. They hurl each other into the sky as if they’ve got super strength. There’s also a co-op door opening animation which rarely ever works. You’ll clip through the textures more often than it goes off without a hitch. The animations are bad all round, with climbing sections being the worst instance. Characters just don’t convey the reality of the actions they’re performing.

Occasionally there are at least slightly interesting sections that show an attempt to be more interesting. There’s something surprising in a part where Kirk and Spock stumble onto portable transporters and can warp each other from where they’re standing onto immovable pads. This section is a welcome departure from the rest of the game, making for a nice break from combat, but it doesn’t feel as if full advantage was taken of the mechanic. You solve one puzzle involving the collection of a box from an otherwise inaccessible room, but from that point it’s mostly just a method of getting from one area to another.


Star Trek would be simply a boring attempt to emulate some parts from better games and get by on that, but it’s just so unpolished that it’s not even remotely recommendable. It’s a game that you can see had initial glimpses of achieving more, but through whatever circumstances in development that bottomed out it just doesn’t do enough work to justify your money or even it’s own existence.