Star Trek Elite Force II Updated Preview

Even though plenty of Star Trek episodes have featured Wild West-style shootouts, gung-ho action probably isn't what comes to mind when you think of the long-running sci-fi series. But Star Trek: Voyager Elite Force managed to justify setting a first-person shooter in the Star Trek universe, and it featured enough story to vary the game's pacing. The upcoming sequel, Star Trek Elite Force II, has come along way since we saw it last fall, and it's looking like Activision's plan to make the sequel bigger and more varied is likely to pay off. The game's release is only a couple of months away now, and it's set to hit beta in just two weeks' time.

As tough as humanoid enemies are, the exomorphs are much tougher.

No matter what you think of Star Trek, it's clear that the property has given the game's designers at Ritual plenty of material to draw from. Elite Force II seems to incorporate content more directly inspired by the recent movies (including recognizable voice acting from Patrick Stewart and others and levels based on many of the Enterprise E's decks), and it draws on ubiquitous tricorder for many new gameplay elements, but there's also a lot of new stuff created for the game that went through the Paramount approval process. In addition to a bunch of new weapons, many of which aren't simple beam weapons, there are two new humanoid races and a race of engineered creatures that play an essential role in the story.

The original game had you assume the role of a top operative on the Hazard Team, an elite security force formed on the Voyager to deal with some of the extreme threats that ship faced while isolated in the Delta quadrant. But at the end of the Voyager series, the ship did make it back to Federation space, and that's where you'll spend most of your time in Elite Force II. However, the first mission does correspond with the series finale of Voyager, and the Hazard Team must go on board the Borg sphere and neutralize it. After their return to Earth, the Voyager's crew gets reassigned to various posts throughout Starfleet, but an incident brings the Hazard Team to Picard's attention, and it's reassembled in time to deal with some dramatic new threats.

Is that a radiation cannon in your pocket? Sometimes only heavy weapons get the job done.

One of the missions we saw featured the team's first encounter with the exomorphs, or at least the little ones. The Enterprise locates the USS Dallas, which recently left an Attrexian space station but apparently ran into some kind of trouble. By the time you get to it, it's a dead ship, with holes in the hull and no gravity. At this point, you have to explore the ship, which has more than a few bodies floating around, and to get the power back on you'll solve some basic tricorder puzzles that involve navigating some narrow Jeffries tubes to the right locations, pulling out the tricorder, and manipulating a simple representation of energy conduits until the power gets from point A to point B. Restoring the power involves a series of such puzzles, but this is only one of many examples of how the tricorder will be used in the game. It also features a minimap of the area with the relative positions of your squadmates, and it can be used to scan walls for weak spots that can be blown open to find either mission-critical passages or secret areas. But you don't need to worry about long stretches between action sequences, and these initial levels were recently modified somewhat to add more action early on.