Star Trek: Shattered Universe review

In the heat of a battle

Shattered Universe builds a game around the premise of a single episode of the original Star Trek series. This builds a story where you are dragged into a parallel universe where the Federation doesn’t exist and in its place is the evil Terran Empire. You become mistaken for a part of this evil and oppressive empire when your ship is dragged to this universe and transformed into one of the Empire’s ships. As a pilot you are put in charge of the new battle shuttles that the exploration shuttles have been transformed into. The game pits you in battle first against the Enterprise and then against other shuttles and large ships.

Authenticity

Yup, thats' the enterprise

Shattered Universe is immediately recognisable as Star Trek fare from the opening cut scene and the voiceovers from Sulu and Chekov help to get the atmosphere going. The graphics are bold and stylised heavily in the traditional Star Trek manner. This game really does look just how you’d want a Star Trek game to look. The cut scenes look good too with decent pre-rendered graphics, although the voice acting is rather wooden and George Takei (Sulu) sounds like he’s been practicing the opening speech since the TV series and it ends up sounding over rehearsed. The in-game sound effects are pretty good with meaty explosions and good effects for the phasers and torpedoes.

Losing Control

When Klingons attack

Sadly the presentation isn’t the only thing that sets this game out as a Star Trek game, since in common with most other Trek games it plays pretty poorly. This is a common affliction of games that try to cash in on a license and Shattered Universe is no exception. The first problem you’ll note is with the controls. The layout is almost as standard but sadly key buttons are moved around to make the whole system unwieldy. The left thumbstick is used to turn left and right whilst the right is used to rotate your craft. Whilst this is fine, the triggers by default are used for the thrust which again makes a nice combination until you come to shoot at anything. The red and green buttons are used for the primary and secondary weapons which is pretty difficult to get at whilst trying to manoeuvre the ship in the heat of battle. You can switch the thrust with the weapons - making it possible to shoot and twist the ship around but not shoot, move and manoeuvre. The inability to put the thrust on up and down on the left thumbstick destroys the games playability immediately and is clear indication that this was originally designed the PS2 with its four shoulder buttons.

Shattered Illusions

The layout of the controls isn’t the only problem with the game, which quickly becomes apparent. The battles which really are the main element of gameplay suffer from poor AI, poor weaponry and poor targeting. This is really pretty damning for a space combat game whatever license it’s based on. The targeting just doesn’t seem to work. You can aim for the highlighted target which indicates how far to lead the target but it’s only when the enemy is almost on top of you that it becomes possible to hit them. The weaponry suffers from a lack of variety with the phasers and energy pulse weapons all having the same affect on the enemy and there’s nothing to stop you just holding down the fire buttons as the weapons don’t ever run out or require recharging. As for the AI that really shows when you’re attacking the larger ships. Here you need to get in close, get rid of the shields and then fly through attacking the ship. You can get pretty close before the ship you’re attacking turns its attention to you and even then it’s only intermittent. The opposing ship is likely to fire a couple of rounds at you and then get back to what it was doing. The opposing shuttles don’t try to protect their main ship either but also don’t fight in packs against you very well.

Playing Solo

Star Trek is a single player only title which sees you fighting your way across this alternative reality to try and get back home in the space anomaly that got you there in the first place. The missions are primarily based around fighting against enemy shuttles or ships. These are mixed up with scouting missions where you fly between asteroids destroying them to gather resources. Between asteroids you get attacked by occasional small parties of enemies but nothing to really bother you. These segments are there to plot your journey across the sector of space but get rather tedious as the game progresses. Sadly there is no sense of movement as you wend your way between the stars. No sense of movement means no sense of speed which makes the long flying between asteroids uninteresting and the combat tricky, as it’s hard to tell how fast you’re approaching objects.

Missing a Trek

Shattered Universe had the chance to build an interesting story around an episode from the TV series. The voice acting lets the narrative down however and reduces the chances of the story alone being sufficient to entice gamers to part with their cash even further. The awkward controls mean that the other problems with the gameplay probably won’t be noticeable as you wrestle with the controller. Fortunately the poor AI of the enemy means that complex manoeuvring is less important as they’re unlikely to attack you in a sustained way. All in all this is just a waste of the Star Trek license and it misses a trick with an interesting idea.