The Away Teams in Star Trek lore have their members armed and equipped, but they were meant more for exploratory work than as strike-forces. Star Trek fans that wished for more bad-ass teams in the Star Trek franchise would have their wish come true in the first Elite Force game. In that game, the player is placed in the role of a leader of a Hazard Team, which is a lot better armed and shielded for the purposes of missions that are far nastier than those that Away Teams will face.
Elite Force II has the same premise, but it has reduced emphasis on the theme of teams now, which detracts from the appeal of the game; one of the reasons for this reduction is the redesign of the protagonist from the first game.
In the first game, the protagonist is Alex Munro, whose gender-neutral first-name allowed the player to decide whether he/she should be female or male. In the second game, Alex is irrefutably male. This may not seem related to the matter that has just been mentioned, but it is the tip of the figurative iceberg of change that had been imposed on the player character.
The single-player story mode has the game picking up where the first game left off, which is that the legendary Voyager had been stranded in the midst of a Borg Cube. The Hazard Team has to free the Voyager from a constantly adapting Borg, which also managed to develop a counter-measure for the weapon that was developed specifically to defeat them in the first Elite Force game.
Such a set-up makes for an explosively suspenseful and thrilling prologue, but they also double as a bitter experience for Alex, who had his confidence as a leader shaken. This is used as the plot excuse to have Alex romping around on his own for more than half of the game, which can be a disappointment to Star Trek fans that deem that teams should always stay as teams.
However, while Alex's frequent shirking of leadership can be disappointing, his lonesome treks (pun not intended) throughout the game are packed with plenty of action and guns.
Speaking of guns, a veteran of the shooter genre will notice that the guns in Elite Force II fulfill the array of weapon archetypes that are typically found in shooters. This would have been quite a disappointment to a player who had been expecting weapons as outlandish as the Phaser, but fortunately, they have secondary firing modes that make most of them feel less typical.
Yet, a few of the weapons appear to be redundant in function: they not only share the same fundamental designs for primary firing modes, but also secondary modes, too. The weapons in the game will be briefly described to illustrate this.
The Phaser returns as the default gun, being largely unchanged from the first game and its canonical designs in the live-action series and movies. It is still a very reliable default weapon as ever (which can't be said about the default weapons in so many other sci-fi shooters), but some balancing has been implemented, such as a reduction in its effective range to prevent players from using it as a long-range weapon (and thus diluting the value of the guns that specialize in long-range exchanges).
The Compression Rifle returns, fulfilling the role of the assault rifle archetype of weapons. Its secondary fire also more than resembles the grenade-launcher of assault rifles, though it is a significant change from the first game where its secondary fire was more like a railgun.
There is another version of the Compression Rifle, called the Enhanced Compression Rifle, which uses the same ammunition and have a primary fire mode that is superior to that of the regular one, though it does consume more ammo per shot. Even its secondary mode is a similar grenade-launcher archetype, albeit more powerful but more difficult to aim. Nevertheless, the more difficult handling and higher ammo consumption are not much of a balance against the higher damage-per-second statistic of this gun. This means it outclasses its regular cousin, which is not necessarily a good thing as sci-fi shooters are better off having balanced weaponry with different functions.
The not-really-appropriately named Assault Rifle fulfills the shotgun archetype in shooters, but more importantly fills in a tactical gap in the previous game's selection of weapons. Its secondary fire gives the user an explosive solution for bunches of enemies in medium range.
The Infinity Modulator, which has been transferred over from the first game, was made with a narrative-oriented purpose, i,e. as a weapon that is conveniently always effective against the Borg's shields. However, gameplay-wise, it is something like a hybrid of an assault rifle, a sniper rifle and a beam-generating gun - of which there are others in the game, which do what they do better because of their specialization. These guns make it redundant in game modes other than single-player.
The Romulan Disruptor serves as a sub-machinegun archetype, though its secondary fire also gives it a railgun-like firing option, making it somewhat a general-purpose weapon.
The Attrexian Arc Launcher is a peculiar cross between the assault rifle and flamethrower archetypes, especially if the player considers the design of its secondary firing mode that releases a pall of volatile gas that can be ignited.
The Tetryon Gatling Gun fulfills the archetype of the minigun, though the game's insistence on having multiple guns share the same ammo type means that the Gatling Gun may deprive other guns with different combat roles precious ammo. The same complaint can also be said of other guns with easily recognizable roles, such as the simply-named and self-explanatory Sniper Rifle and Grenade Launcher.
Then, there is the Quantum Burst Launcher, which fulfills the rocket/missile launcher archetype.
There are some weapons whose significance lie in the story, so they will not be elaborated here because that would constitute spoilers. However, it should be noted here that they appear to have the same functions that other weapons have, but they use different ammo types and different statistics, though it still makes them somewhat redundant. They do have some interesting secondary fire options, but these only appear to be useful in the single-player story mode, where the AI-controlled enemies are not smart enough to evade their secondary firing modes.
If the weapons seem somewhat disappointing to a Star Trek fan because they are not outrageous enough to be anything other than the usual weapon archetypes found in sci-fi shooters, then he/she may be entertained by the bizarre array of enemies and allies in the story mode.
However, they may not feel diverse enough though; there are only a handful of AI scripts that govern the behavior of enemies, despite the greater variety of models that they have.
There are the Borg, who are slow enemies with hardly any initiative to find cover (and whom the player will rip through with the I-Mod). Next, there are the Brood, which send swarms of single-minded (and often suicidal) monsters at the player character.
After these, there are the humanoid enemies, all of which carry guns and use the same AI scripts that govern their tactics and strategies, which wouldn't be very impressive to a veteran of sci-fi shooters anyway.
Perhaps the most interesting enemies are a race of aliens that will not be named in this review because they are an important part of the narrative. There are more than several types of them, and most of them behave in a different manner compared to each other. There are those that typically swarm and charge at the player, those that are armed with biological weapons and saturate the area with plasma and those that are powerful and tough enough to be mini-bosses.
However, once they have been revealed in the story mode, they are going to be the bulk of enemies that the player has to battle, which can be a bit tiresome.
Alex Munro won't be fighting alone some of the time, and when he is not, he is usually accompanied by the other members of his team. They do a pretty good job of following the player character around, e.g. they have little path-finding issues. They are also rendered invulnerable and have unlimited ammunition, so the player can choose to have them do most of the fighting - which is probably a good idea as the player character often ends up having to fight alone more than he should.
As for the designs of the story, the tendency for the protagonist to fight alone has already been mentioned. Most of the twists in the plot are there to give an excuse for action-packed, thrilling sequences that separate him from his team. There is a lot of fan-service too, such as more than a few scenes that involve meetings between the canonical characters of Star Trek such as Jean-Luc Picard and Reginald Barclay and the members of the less-canonical Hazard Team, which occur on the Enterprise.
The story also contains designs that attempt to instill some elements of romance: the player can make choices, which eventually culminate in two different endings - which fundamentally turn out the same way anyway. The choices for romantic pursuit do not affect the gameplay by much either. They are also only implemented in the non-combat sequences aboard the Enterprise.
While they do advance the storyline and do somewhat match with the themes of Star Trek, these sequences aboard the Enterprise do not seem to mesh well with the action-oriented segment of the story mode.
In fact, they may seem to detract from the game's status as a sci-fi shooter. An example that would illustrate this is a certain interaction between the player character and an incarcerated character, and one that may end in a straight game-over if the player picks the wrong dialogue choices; this is a drastic contrast with the usual game-over that is brought about by the death of the player character in combat.
In addition to the interactive sequences between characters on the Enterprise, the story mode also features some puzzles to solve, which are interacted with using a commonly featured (but not so memorable) sci-fi device which is endemic to Star Trek.
The Tricorder is the device that the player uses to overcome obstacles that cannot be approached outright with gunfire. There are structural defects in the environments of certain levels that bar the way forward, and these have to be discovered using the Tricorder before they can be blown out of the way.
The device is also needed to interact with obstacles that can only be circumvented by transmitting a (sci-fi) "wave" that resonates with their own waves. In other words, these are pattern-matching puzzles, which can seem a bit intrusive when the player would rather want to be shooting at things. (Of course, some Star Trek fans would appreciate these puzzles though.)
The same can be said about the power-routing mini-game, which serves as Elite Force's version of Pipe Dream.
However, it is worth noting here that changing the difficulty affects these puzzles too. This makes the game designs for difficulty settings a bit refreshing, because otherwise they are no more different from the typical difficulty settings found in shooter games, which is that they mainly affect the amount of damage dealt by enemies and that by the player character.
Despite how the puzzles break up the otherwise brisk pace of this game, the player would probably want to solve these puzzles anyway, because they tend to lead to hidden collectibles. Throughout most of the levels in the story mode, there are golden models of the Enterprise sprinkled through their nooks and crannies. Collecting them unlocks maps that are still locked after the game has been installed.
Unfortunately, some of these extra maps do not appear to have much more worth than Easter eggs. There are some maps that are galleries that display the conceptualization of the game, but most of them have nothing to do with the Star Trek license, instead appearing to be miscellaneous stuff that the developers have made in their spare time.
Furthermore, the collectibles are also tied into the access of some multiplayer maps, which the player will not get to host matches with until they have been unlocked (though the player can still join matches hosted by others using these maps), unless they resort to altering the game's codes.
These make the collectibles, which are already technically out-of-place, feel even more so.
While the non-combat parts of the story mode may not seem to contribute much to the game other than as fan-service, they do give Ritual Entertainment the excuse to create models for well-known characters in Star Trek canon. These models are used for multiplayer matches too, which can be quite entertaining. (Watching the aging Picard run around and shoot enemies with gusto can be rather amusing, for example.)
Speaking of multiplayer, Elite Force II has multiplayer match modes that would be nothing new to veterans of sci-fi shooters. There are deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture-the-flag, which are typical multiplayer match types by then.
Bomb Defusion is somewhat of a variant of capture-the-flag: players on either team need to collect a device that is located in the center (and thus most hotly contested part) of the map, and then return it not to their own team's capture-receptacle, but the opposing team's instead. The reward is a spectacular demise of the other team's base, of course. Nonetheless, this match mode has been done before, at least fundamentally.
There are mutators that can be applied to any match to make them feel less derivative, though, again, mutators won't be unfamiliar to veterans of sci-fi shooters by then.
Elite Force II uses the idTech 3 engine, which by then had been licensed by many developers and worked on to include many kinds of alterations. In the case of Ritual Entertainment, it has used its proprietary ÜberTools to create a distinctive artstyle for the game, which certainly looks very different from its predecessor.
The result is a sharp, clean look that pays a lot of tribute to the environments that had been seen in Star Trek media, especially the interiors of the Enterprise. The character models also have been given the same treatment, thus granting them crisp and well-detailed appearances.
That is not to say that levels that are not located on the Enterprise or any other locations associated with the Federation are just as sharp-looking though, because this would have made them too gaudy-looking.
Instead, these environments have looks that are suitable to their themes, such as ancient alien ruins having an understandably worn-down look to it. However, these levels are also where the idTech 3 engine shows its age. A lot of them have surfaces with muddy textures and polygons with less-than-smooth edges for environmental objects.
The animations in the game also betray the age of the idTech 3 engine. This can be seen from watching how characters sometimes turn around without any actual motion of their body parts in many cutscenes and how stiff they are when the developers cannot apply the breathing animations on them, among other oversights. Facial animations are also quite limited, though lip-synching is fortunately quite satisfactory.
As a shooter game, the most prominent of the sound effects that Elite Force II has of course belong to the guns. They sound suitably outlandish, though they may not be much of a surprise to players who are used to the zings and chiming of sci-fi weapons.
There are some refreshing sound effects to be heard from the more inhuman of enemies in the game: they are satisfactorily creepy to listen to and do somewhat help in alleviating the impression that they tend to be rather simple-minded enemies.
The soundtracks in the game are mostly in tune with whatever is happening on-screen, though they are not very remarkable.
The voice-acting is perhaps the best-done aspect of the sound designs of Elite Force II. Activision, which is the publisher of the game, has managed to rope in voice-over talents that include Patrick Stewart (to give voice to Captain Picard) and Dwight Schultz. Such hiring of celebrities is of course meant to increase the appeal of the game to Star Trek fans, but their voice-over work is generally fantastic though.
In conclusion, Elite Force II is undoubtedly aesthetically superior to its predecessor and has a lot more pizzazz, but its gameplay is still designed in the same-but-solid manner, which may not attract anyone that is not already fan of the previous game or Star Trek itself.