As Star Trek licenses go, the Voyager license can't really be considered one of the best. Star Trek: The Next Generation and the classic Star Trek series both enjoy huge followings. Deep Space Nine even has its devout followers. But Voyager has never really had the draw that the other franchises have had. Moreover, in the world of computer gaming, there have been moderate successes for some of the other Star Trek lines but nothing for the Voyager license. Activision hopes to change all that in the coming months, as it and developer Raven Software put the finishing touches on Star Trek: Voyager Elite Force, a 3D first-person action game.

There has been confusion in the past regarding Star Trek action games such as Generations and the ill-fated First Contact. In those cases, the developers tried to balance the spirit of the Star Trek universe, which meant having lots of dialogue and peaceable solutions to problems, and the nature of the first-person action genre, which meant throwing in lots of action. The two didn't mix too well,

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and the results were games that failed to succeed in either area. For Voyager Elite Force, developer Raven Software decided to throw out the whole notion of making this game an action-adventure with the normally happy diplomacy of the Star Trek license. The team has made no illusions of the fact that Elite Force is a pure action game, only set in the Voyager universe. If the team has its way, Voyager Elite Force will be just as much an action game as such celebrated action fare as Quake and Unreal.

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The premise for Star Trek: Voyager Elite Force is simple. The Voyager has been trapped in a ship's graveyard and must get out. However, getting out is no simple matter. There is an alien power that holds the ships in this deep-space sargasso and other similarly trapped space-faring aliens who are hostile to you and the Voyager crew. A fiction created for this game is the Elite Force, the special-ops division of the Voyager military crew. As the second in command of the Elite Forces, it is your job to infiltrate the other alien ships of the graveyard to find clues to the mysterious force that anchors you to this place. You then must locate the source of the alien influence and destroy it. Along the way, not-so-friendly aliens will be trying to dissuade you from your course. You'll need to use your wits and your weapons to put down such resistance and save the Voyager.

Next: The game itself