Star Trek: Away Team

The Good
Away Team begins very promisingly. The holographic technology aboard the USS Incursion has led a Romulan Warbird away from a Klingon Research facility, leaving your away team with enough time to disable the Romulan forces and rescue the Klingon scientists. As Data directs you from on ship, your team sneaks around Romulan snipers, deactivates force fields, and throws concussion grenades. Sure this level is pretty linear. Sure the handholding is borderline insulting. But hey, this is the training level isn’t it?

Here’s how Away Team works: Prior to each mission, you receive a briefing. Early on in the game these feature rendered view screens, later on there is just a generic star field. Based on the briefing you have to select your crew. While there are six slots on the transporter, you are usually limited to around four crew members. There may also be some crew members you have to take. There will also be required equipment you have to take (like a sniper rifle) so you will have to select crewman from the appropriate specialties (Security, Medical, Engineering, etc). This process resembles the team and kit selection from Rainbow Six, except for the extreme amount of handholding.

While the away teams of the television series were part of the “explore strange new worlds” métier, this away team resembles Elite Force. You’ll be using your phaser far more than your tricorder. Even some medical personal have more neural disrupter charges than hyposprays. You even have some Vulcans for the neck pinch.

The team members do represent the different career choices within the Federation and the various species. In an interesting touch, some crewmembers converse with others and if a crewmember has visited a planet before, they’ll have special insight. Whether you like all your crewmembers or not, they all have to make it back home. This seems like an odd design choice since historically the away team seems to be expendable.

This game does have a large combat portion although there are stealth elements. You have the option to toggle sound circles (which represent how much noise your character and his/her actions make) and you can see the vision cones of “enemies” and security cameras. If you choose combat, you may be surprised that while it only takes one stun hit to disable a target, it takes several kills. Stun whether induced by neck pinch or phaser lasts 10-15 seconds- according to the difficulty level.

Finally, each mission has primary objectives and secondary objectives. Primary ones must be completed for the level to end and the successful completion of secondary objectives allows access to more powerful weaponry and defenses later in the game.

The Bad
For the most part, Away Team bravely does away with strange new worlds and recycles life and civilizations we’ve seen time and time again. I know in the 1980’s, if you wanted to create a ST game you had to buy the rights to each race individually, but that’s no longer the case. I got quite tired of the Borg and Romulans by the end of this game.

This game is far too linear. The reason is that this game isn’t an action game or an adventure game, but a puzzle/strategy game. This is also revealed by strange design choices like allowing five away team members one level and then only four the next. By requiring certain team members and equipment, rather than trusting the player to make educated choices. And finally, by preventing the player from losing any away team members. You knew in Rainbow Six, that if you were losing team members, then it was only going to get harder in the end. Listen, give us characters we care about and we’ll keep them alive.

This game could have been improved by customization. I mentioned earlier that you gained abilities by completing secondary objectives. Why not have instituted a point system where the player could choose which upgrades were important. Why not have the option to purchase more ammo or hyposprays. Why does Sinjin Kirk have seven Sniper Rounds but T'Andorla have only three? What’s the point in having a sniper with only three shots? Why can’t team members swap gear?

Why have statistics for the crewmembers? They are rated on speed, stealth and stamina. They all run at the same speed and all make the same amount of noise, the only difference was in the amount of damage they could take.

What’s up with the AI? Enemies either walk a patrol with such regularity that you can time when they’ll be where or they guard a door. Your own team has no AI. They won’t even return fire. It would have been really nice to have a defensive setting. How can this game have gotten wrong things that Fallout Tactics got right?

The Good
-- Unknown part of Star Trek: Special Operations -- Lots of stealth action -- Lots of weapons and gadgets -- Gadgets can be improved

The Bad
-- Gadgets are limited to certain individuals (which makes little sense) -- A lot of timing based puzzles you must do in real-time -- Improvements to gadgets seem to occur at random and undocumented -- Missions gets repetitive after a while

The Bottom Line
Away Team is best described as Star Trek meets Commandos. While it provides quite a bit of challenge in itself, and kept the Star Trek flavor intact, its limitations and lack of innovation make it an average title at best.

You command the crew of USS Incursion, a special operations ship of Federation Starfleet, and you do the jobs when deniability is key... Think Splinter Cell on a larger scale, and you get the idea. The missions start simple, of course, then gets progressively harder, until you get to the mission where one misstep can be the end of the quadrant.

The game is played as isometric view. it is essentially 2D with no "walk-behind" allowed. Each mission has a pretty large field and provides variety of challenges. Often, you must sneak past guards and cameras. While a single member is each, for the whole party it would be difficult. Fortunately, you get two onscreen displays to help you... You get to see the visual cone of one camera / guard, and you get your own sound cones, which shows you how far your footstep sounds are carrying.

The missions are quite chalenging, and have multiple approaches. Do you sneak past the guard when he's not looking and never raise the alarm, or do you just stun the guard, run past and go for the security building to erase the log? Many choices can be made. While most of the time stealth is the better option, it is NOT always the case. Also, there are a few missions where you are NOT allowed to use lethal force.

Even though this game is about stealth, there are plenty of weapons available, from phasers to phaser rifles, from special "sniper" rifles to EMP grenades, from poison hyposprays to concussion grenades, there are plenty of weapons for different uses. And you will need them as you encounter both friends and allies, along with plenty of aliens, even the Borg.

The gameplay is real-time with pause, and thus you can use that to coordinate simultaneous actions simple enough. On the other hand, often you will use one team member at a time just because that person has a certain item YOU need in order to get something else you need.

A typical mission goes like this: assemble the team you need (by noting the requirements of certain gadgets to be present), start the mission, work your way past guards (either avoid or terminate, depending on ROE). When you got to the computer terminal, send in the engineer to hack the terminal and get the data. Once data's completely, mission ends as you get beamed up.

The tension is in avoiding the guards and the camera networks.