Star Trek: Encounters

"Star Trek: Encounters, cheap but fun"

Star Trek: Encounters is an action/arcade-style game set in the Star Trek Universe. It was released for less than $20, but for a bargain-priced game it's actually not that bad.

GRAPHICS: 7/10
The ships in Star Trek: Encounters are small, as it's laid out to give you a bird's eye view of the battlefield. But all the ships look good and are faithful to the various incarnations of the TV series. The backgrounds and starfields are quite attractive, but you won't get to admire them a whole lot while you're busy playing the game.

SOUND: 6/10
The battle sounds in Star Trek: Encounters are quite adequate. Phasers and Photon Torpedoes sound like they should. The explosions are about average, but perfectly up to the task. William Shatner narrates the storyline behind each of the single player missions, and he certainly sounds like he wishes he were somewhere else besides a recording studio doing another Star Trek video game.

CONTROLS: 6/10
The control layout does have a bit of a learning curve. The left analog stick steers whatever ship you're commanding, while the right analog stick is used to aim your "targeting slice" by rotating it in a 360 degree arc around your ship. Any enemies that come inside the targeting slice are subject to being locked onto by pressing R2, allowing you then to unleash whatever weapon you have selected with a press of R1. Coordinating all of these actions effectively requires practice, but once you get the hang of it you'll be blowing your enemies to pieces in no time. Phasers are by far the easiest weapon to use, since they never miss, but photon torpedoes may be necessary to take out some of the bigger and more powerful enemy ships. The game offers some secondary weapons like mines, but I have never found them to be worth the trouble. Sticking to phasers and photons will usually be more than adequate. You also have controls that allow your ship to dive (L2) or climb (L1) on the plane of the battlefield, but most of the levels don't require it and you will usually forget about it.

GAMEPLAY: 7/10
Since this is what's probably going to turn someone on or off of a bargain-priced game, I'll give you the really bad news first. The single player campaign consists of six sets of missions, each set containing from 2 to 5 individual missions. The mission sets start with the NX-01 from Star Trek: Enterprise and goes through every generation of the TV show, ending with a few bonus missions using Picard's Sovereign Class Enterprise-E. The missions, to be brief, are very, very repetitive. A lot of them involving flying your ship through a series of "warp conduits", which are basically just swirly-looking rings in space that give you a speed boost, and which I don't remember ever actually seeing in any of the series. The only reason to even play through the single player campaign is to unlock all the bonus levels and ships for Skirmish Mode, which is where you'll be spending most of your time. The other really bad news is that this game has a tendency to freeze up, meaning that all action stops and there is no way to unfreeze it, causing you to lose all of your progress and you have to reset your PS2. This is really maddening when you're just about to beat your high score in Skirmish Mode.

Now for Skirmish mode. You can go up against another ship head-to-head, but most individual enemies are so easy to kill that the fight is over in about 30 seconds. I found that if I challenged the Borg Queen's ship using the NX-01 or the Constitution class that this could present a real challenge, but otherwise Head-to-Head is pretty boring. The most fun part of the game is Onslaught, which basically allows you to pick your favorite Starfleet ship and then see how long you can survive against hordes of enemy vessels. If you really want to be challenged by this mode, stick with the weaker ships like the NX-01 or the Constitution class, whose slower engines, weaker shields and less powerful phasers mean that you will really have to be skillful to make it into the high scores. You'll rely a lot on the bonus pickups you find around the battlefield, which can give you things like enchanced phaser power, temporary cloaking, or temporary invincibility.

REPLAYABILITY: 5/10
Skirmish mode, especially Onslaught, is the only part of the game that will really hold any replay value at all. I don't play anything but Onslaught anymore.

OVERALL: 7/10
If this game had been released at the usual release price of $50, this score would have been around a 3 or 4. But for a bargain-bin game, this one is actually pretty decent. There's not a lot of deep strategy involved, and it's probably not going to appeal to anyone except for fans of Star Trek. But if you like Star Trek and are looking for a simple and reasonably entertaining game to distract you from time to time, this one is worth checking out.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 01/16/07