A frustrating control scheme marrs what could have made a decent game great.
Star Trek: Encounters is an arcade style shoot-em-up game that adds a small amount of strategy to its gameplay. The level design is pretty bland, consisting pretty much of still shots of planets, nebulas, and the like. The playfield is littered with asteroids, mines, space stations, and other stuff you'd expect to see in the Star Trek universe. Your ship moves along a 2 dimensional plane, but you can shift up or down to a higher plane with a touch of the L1 or L2 buttons, respectively.
The control scheme is where the game falls flat. It was apparently designed for a person with three hands. In combat, you control your ship with the left thumbstick and move the targeting cone with the right. This is simple enough. However, in order to use your weapons, you must first select which weapon you wish to use with the X button (primary weapons like phasers and torpedoes) or the O button (secondary weapons like tractor beam, mines, transporter). To fire a weapon, you'll have to use the R1 button. If you want to lock on your weapons, you'll need to use the R2 button simultaneously. If you can manage all this without twisting your fingers into something reminiscent of a pretzel, you'll be able to complete the missions with ease. Additionally, you are able to divert power from one area of the ship like weapons to beef up your shields. This is controlled by yet another part of the controller, the directional pad. Yet, the triangle and square face buttons go unused. It seems to me that at least two of your attack options could have been mapped to these buttons.
The mission variety is pretty good, and they are the kind of things you would expect to do in a Star Trek game. You'll have missions that require you to follow an enemy ship's warp trail, tractor beam a damaged ship to safety, and take it to bad guys like the Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, and more. You'll recreate various story arcs from the five series. For example, in the Enterprise era you will be tasked over the three missions with stopping the Xindi plot to destroy Earth from the show's third season. There are a total of 20 missions in the episode mode, which is the equivalent of any other game's story mode. Your tasks become repetitive after a while, and other than the combat, some of them aren't really that fun.
The episode mode likely won't take you very long to complete, as some of the series have two or three missions each. The missions do have a tendency to drag on longer than they should, making it feel like it actually takes longer than it does. It would have been nice if the game developers would have made it possible to pick a single series from the start of the game to play through. Unfortunately, you must start on the Enterprise era and work your way up to The Original Series, The Next Generation, and so on.
The score of the game captures the spirit of Star Trek pretty well with its original orchestral pieces. With a good set of ears, you might be able to catch variations on the themes from the show tucked away deep. There is a little bit of voiceover work done by the legendary Captain Kirk, William Shatner himself, but its dull and flat.
So this budget title provides a decent Star Trek experience and it won't be hard on your wallet. That in itself may be the biggest reason to pick this title up. It would have been nice to see what 4J Studios and Bethesda could have come up with given a full-price title. But Star Trek: Encounters should give you Trek fans the cure for the itch and fill the gap for the remaining time until Star Trek: Legacy is released.