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Star Trek: Elite Force II

By Brad Cook
You look down. You’re wearing a red shirt. Uh oh. Aspyr Media’s Star Trek: Elite Force II wouldn’t be much fun if you played the ship’s captain and sat in a chair barking orders while looking out a viewscreen. That’s why you take on the role of Lieutenant Alexander Munro, hazard team leader and guy voted Most Likely to Get Chomped By a Space Monster by his graduating class at Starfleet Academy.

Beyond Voyager
Okay, so we made up that last part. But don’t load this game on your Mac and expect a tactical, ship-to-ship combat game. Elite Force II is a first-person shooter that puts you in the middle of the action, watching the events in the story unfold through Munro’s eyes.

When the game opens, Munro must help the USS Voyager break free of a Borg sphere and continue the final leg of its journey home, as shown in the series finale of the Star Trek Voyager TV show. While Elite Force II is a sequel to the original Star Trek Voyager game, it no longer bears the name “Voyager” as the show ended in 2001 when the ship finally returned to Federation space after spending six years in the far-flung Delta Quadrant.

Once you’re back at Federation headquarters, you meet Captain Jean-Luc Picard (voiced by actor Patrick Stewart), who assigns you to lead the Enterprise’s hazard team, an away team specially trained to deal with nasty situations that the rest of the crew can’t handle. You’re not on the job for more than a few minutes when the Enterprise receives a distress call from a derelict Federation starship. The exploration of that ship gives the game a “haunted house in space” feel that launches you into the core of the storyline: horrible creatures are attacking Federation ships and outposts, and it’s up to you and your team to stop the threat.

Solving Puzzles and Uncovering Secrets
You’ll have other hazard team members with you during most missions, but oftentimes they’ll rely on you to figure out problems, find control panels that will restore critical functions and learn what’s around the next corner. (Either they’re not the go-getters you are or they know that old Star Trek joke about the red shirts.) Many of the control panels feature puzzles that you must solve; for example, some of them require you to change the settings of an energy wave so that it matches another one.

Elite Force II also contains six secret maps that you can unlock by discovering golden starships hidden around the game. There are 70 in all, so you’ll need to take your time and explore every level before leaving it (a warning tells you when you’re about to enter the next level and lets you know how many golden starships you’re leaving behind). There are also other secrets that you can uncover if you’re persistent.

Gene Roddenberry Probably Never Envisioned This
Of course, no first-person shooter is complete without multiplayer mayhem, and Elite Force II offers plenty of what it calls multi-match modes. If you’d rather not play against others in a LAN or Internet match, you can set up a solo game that uses computer-controlled players, or “bots,” that feature difficulty settings you can change.

Aside from the usual capture the flag and deathmatch (here called holomatch) game types, you can choose from 11 others that include: disintegration (everyone gets sniper rifles that kill with one hit); action hero (one player has all the weapons, fully loaded, and the ability to regenerate health; the player who kills him gets five points and becomes the new action hero); and bomb defusion (each team tries to successfully plant and detonate a bomb in the other team’s base; tricorders are required for bomb planting and defusing).

Next Gen Trek
Star Trek away teams have come a long way from the nameless, red-shirted guys who bought the farm on missions during the original show’s TV run. The next generation hazard teams sport multi-species make-ups of both genders, new uniforms and flashy weapons, but the danger is still the same. Now it’s time for you to prove that old joke wrong.

Available from Aspyr

Borg

Here There Be Romulans. Help clear out this Klingon base taken over by Romulans. But there’s a twist.

control panel

Prepare to Be Assimilated. Help Voyager break free of this Borg sphere.

Star Trek Elite Force II Media

View QuickTime trailer

System Requirements:

	Mac OS X version 10.1.5 or higher
	733MHz PowerPC G3 processor or faster
	256MB of RAM
	16MB video card (ATI Radeon or NVIDIA GeForce 2 series card. 32MB or higher recommended)
	1.05GB of free hard disk space
	56K/LAN or higher for internet play

If you liked this game, check out:

	Aliens vs. Predator 2
	Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force
	Unreal Tournament 2003

Tips and Tricks
Voyager

The Borg adapt to your weapons, so a phaser blast that works one minute may be much less effective the next. Almost every weapon has an alternate fire mode that you can access with the second mouse button, though, so switch to that if the primary mode seems to lose effectiveness.

If your weapons are low on energy or your health drops precariously, you can always take cover during a battle and let your teammates do the dirty work.

When rerouting power at a control panel, make sure you rotate the pieces that are connected to red power nodes away from them first. Otherwise, you could successfully complete a conduit but discover that it was already linked to a red power node, in which case the red power node short-circuits the system and you have to start over.

In the mission where you have to stop the plasma leak in the beginning, talk to Chell and then immediately go into the shuttle’s main cabin. This will give you a head start when he says that the leak has started and you have to fix it before time runs out (the conversation will continue even though you won’t be able to hear his end of it; you’ll know when the leak starts, however).
the Borg

Remember, your tricorder has a secondary function that allows you to check the structural integrity of your surroundings. Use it when you’re stuck and you’ll probably find a weak wall or door that you can blast a hole in. It will also help you uncover gas leaks and hidden energy signatures.

If you enter a new area but you’re not sure what to do next, try walking toward the exit doors, even if they have red lights above them, and clicking on control panels. Your teammates will often stand around until you do something that triggers a scripted action from them, which will in turn create a new objective for you to complete. For example, at one point aboard the derelict USS Dallas, you need to access the bridge. When you reach the hallway that contains the door to the bridge, you have to actually walk up to that door before Chell says that it’s locked and you have to find another way in.

When you first board the Attrexian station, head toward the locked door in the corner of the landing bay. Blast it open and hide out in that room until the monsters attack. You can defend yourself more easily from that space since you don’t have to worry about your back, and it includes health regeneration and weapons energy stations that you can use to refuel if you take too much damage or overuse your assault rifle.