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Star Trek: Away Team
By James SterrettArticle Date: May 09, 2001
Article Type: Review
Version: Release
Star Trek: Away Team (STAT) should have been a better game than it is. I was pretty excited by the prospect of the game. The basic premise is good: the Federation has developed a new “holographic ship-masking technology”, and using this, will deploy a team of Federation special-ops agents in eighteen tense, sneaky missions. You command these agents from a 3/4 perspective, as in Syndicate and X-Com, and they have different weapons kits and skills.
The enemy’s field of vision and hearing is modeled so you can sneak around and pot them from behind, or just plain sneak past them. Hire in the actors for Data and Worf to provide that authentic Trek feel and ensure there’s some talented voice acting. Sadly, STAT turns out to be frustrating and sometimes boring. Nonetheless, those of you who love micro-management may love it.
Sneaking into a Romulan base
Many of the peripherals work well. The voice acting from Brent Spiner and Michael Dorn is, predictably, quite good – though the rest is not up to the same level. The levels are pretty and look like the locations they are meant to represent. Better still, characters rarely get hidden behind objects in the play area – though this is accomplished by ensuring that characters usually cannot move behind those objects.
Weapons fire and appearance is straight out of the Trek shows. The opening movie flows directly and logically into the first mission, which doubles as a tutorial. The opening movie, however, contains the incredible conundrum of watching the Away Team’s CO argue with an Admiral about utilizing the Away Team—after assembling it, after moving it into hostile territory, after revealing the Federation’s latest technologies… Now they argue about running the mission? This may be very “Star Trek”, but in any rational universe the deployment of the away team should have been decided before actually sending the ship on a mission . . . ?
The debriefing for each mission usually flows well into the briefing for the next mission, so the plot as a whole moves forward reasonably well. While the briefings often left me a bit in the dark regarding my actual objectives, the ability to review objectives during the mission cleared matters up.
After your briefing, it’s time to choose the agents for the team. While a good concept, it combines with another good idea and becomes annoying. First, the game lets you choose your team. This is good. Second, the game tells you what specific items of kit are required or recommended for the mission. This is also a good thing. However, it turns out that only a very small number of combinations of agents will actually provide you with the kit you need.
In other words, you aren’t choosing agents so much as playing “guess who the designers meant me to bring”. As a result, what should have been an important opportunity for strategic decision-making is reduced to a tedious guessing game. Fortunately, perhaps, the team members are largely distinguished by their kit. Medical officers shoot as well and as quickly as security officers, but security officers carry bigger guns while medical officers carry med hypos.
The Team Selection puzzle
The team beams down to the mission area and moves out. You hit the first snag: moving. The pathfinding in the game ranks with the worst I’ve seen, sometimes unable to find its way around a single corner. Worse, you can’t assign waypoints. This is quite frustrating, because it forces you to move the team in bunny hops. Moreover, while you can move the team as a group, you have no control over the group formation. If you want team members to wind up in specific locations, you have to move them individually. In bunny hops.
Explore strange new worlds
To make matters more frustrating, the AI isn’t. Enemies know how to follow a patrol route until they detect you, and then to shout, charge, and shoot. The poor pathfinding means they can’t always find an actual firing position, so they may wind up staring at a wall, wondering when it will erode away. In fact, though, that’s not the worst of it. Your own agents have no brains at all. They walk where you tell them, they pull the trigger once each time you tell them to shoot, and that’s it. These elite puppets are incapable of lifting a finger to defend themselves other than to scream for help from the player.
So, on top of poor pathfinding, you need to micromanage every shot from every team member. Fortunately, the game accepts orders while paused – and you’ll be pausing a lot. Unfortunately, much of the interface is clumsy despite the option to customize most keystrokes. By default, the pause key is Enter and the “skip message” key is the easier-to-find Space Bar. Initially, this seems backwards, until you discover that you cannot give orders (or pause the game) when a message is playing. However, if you skip a message, there is no way to replay it. As a result, if you trigger the message at the wrong moment, your agents may wander into danger and die while you are finding out about the latest plot twist or objective. The solution is to skip the sound bite and try to figure out if it was important by checking the Objectives listing for changes.
Another example of the interface’s troubles is the use of the “toggle” for the view and hearing cones. Suppose you click on the Vision Cone icon to toggle one of these “on”, then click on the enemy whose vision you are interested in. Since it’s toggled on, you might think you could click on another enemy to see their vision cone. Wrong – you have to click the icon off, then on again, to see the next enemy’s vision cone.
The game defaults to “scroll acceleration”, which means that the map has “momentum” and keeps moving after you try to stop mouse-scrolling it. Fortunately, this can be disabled, since it is incredibly annoying to try to get the map to stop moving, and sometimes ensures that the map circles about the stop you are trying to look at. I won’t go into the troubles sometimes found in picking up items off the ground, figuring out where the sweet spots are for entering or exiting a building, or the fact that interface confusion frequently leads to clicking the wrong mouse button and moving instead of firing or vice versa.
Taking the fight to the Borg
A large number of the missions require you to use stealth and sneak past enemy patrols. In theory, this is a great idea – Thief, an excellent game, is based around it. However, the sneaking process in STAT is simply . . . dull. You can do it, but it means sitting there and doing nothing for long periods of time, and it’s almost always just as effective to phaser your way through the opposition.
After I’d been making annoyed noises at the game out of my corner of the office for an evening or two, my wife, a Trek fan, decided that perhaps I didn’t like the game because I’m not a big Star Trek fan. So I turned STAT over to her. She found the game to be very “Trek” in its look and feel . . . and insanely annoying to play. She gave up in frustration over the interface halfway through the second mission.
Welcome to Sunny Vulcan
So that’s two of us, one a Trekker, one not, both of whom expected to enjoy Star Trek: Away Team, and both of whom did not. On the other hand, if you enjoy painstaking micro-management, this might be a game you really enjoy. Reflexive Entertainment did a good job of combining the Star Trek atmosphere with a good game idea. Unfortunately, the interface gets in the way, and the greatest frustration about the game is that it ought to have been better than it is.
