Star Trek: Shattered Universe

The Good
The ships are all modeled pretty well, and look nice.

It's great that they got George Tekei and Walter Kroenig too. They really get into their roles. Too bad they couldn't have gotten them to do work on a Star Trek game instead.

The Bad
Don't tell anyone, but I managed to get a recording of the original pitch for Shattered Universe. Don't let this get out, or my man on the inside could get into trouble. OK? Here goes.

Producer: "Hey, maybe we ought to make a Star Trek video game for those new fangled games console machines."

Planner: "Hmm. That sounds difficult. You'd need to do a lot of writing, create an AI that the player has to outwit, script scenarios for the player to puzzle through before finding a best and hopefully non-violent outcome..."

Producer: "What? No no no, you didn't hear me. I said a Star Trek video game."

Planner: "Oh. I guess you could just fly around and blow things up."

Producer: "Yeah, now you heard me."

Shattered Universe takes place entirely within the "mirror universe", a place where nobility is switched with brutality (or, more accurately, a place where pretty much everyone deserves to be shot, so go wild). From my perspective, the fact that the game takes place in an "anti-Federation" universe also serves to make Shattered Universe an anti-Star Trek game. The point of Star Trek has always been diplomacy, discovery, exploration, and understanding. Sulu opens the intro by proclaiming the Excelsior's ongoing mission is to search out new planets and civilizations. He forgot to add the "and blow them all up" to the end of that statement.

See, the developers thought the mirror universe would give them an easy out for how to match a Star Trek game to the high body count of most video games, but that isn't what it's supposed to be used for. The point of the mirror universe is to take all the characters and situations the audience knows and then turn them on their head, showing how differently so many things could have turned out. It only works if there are established characters, and Shattered Universe doesn't have any characters. There's Sulu, mirror-Chekov, and and an unnamed comms officer. There are also some events from the original series that are replayed from a mirror universe perspective, but those aren't so much 'see how this episode played out in the mirror universe' as they are 'see how this episode would have played out if you could have just shot everyone'. If the developers really needed a backdrop for armed engagements they could have retconned the Dominion War and did it proper this time. Of course that would have required a competent writer, so it might not have worked out for them either.

Even if they had gotten the game part right I would still be tearing them down for forcing Star Trek into a hole it doesn't belong in, but they didn't get that part right either. How many years has it been that people have been making 3D space sim/shooters? For all the Wing Commanders and TIE Fighters and Descents that have come out how can anyone think that gameplay this bland is even acceptable anymore? The game is barely even an improvement over Elite, and is significantly less engaging as well. They can't blame it on the franchise holding them back either, because Battlestar Galactica, which amazingly came out months before, managed to translate ship to ship combat that was designed for television into a well crafted interactive system.

It's not even the controls, which are merely serviceable, that are so bad. Your ship has reverse thrust and forward thrust, but both cease to have an effect on your velocity once they've stopped being pushed. Your space craft appears to exist on some kind of momentum treadmill instead of frictionless space. This isn't bad, necessarily, but it doesn't add any control complexity to the game, and it isn't a mandate of the franchise. It just serves to make playing the game less interesting.

What really nails the game dead is how infuriatingly boring combat is. Wave after wave (after wave (after wave (augh seriously why won't the mission just end?))) of fodder craft swarm around objectives, begging to be phasered in half. When "complete mission in 17 minutes" is a bonus objective it should be obvious that there are way too many targets in a level. When the Excelsior gets back to Federation space the player avatar will either get a medal or a discharge for killing more sentient beings than the whole of Starfleet before him.

Then there are the capital ships, largely immobile but vastly better defended. To defeat them you have to find a blind spot in their weapons range and then hide in it as you hold down the weapons fire buttons for a full minute. The game does absolutely nothing interesting with larger craft, like being able to destroy individual weapons ports or damage critical parts. They just explode after being destroyed, and a helpful timer shows up onscreen to show you how much time you have to escape the radius of the blast.

Those explosions, by the way, just like every other ingame cutscene in the game, take place in real time and can not be skipped. Chasing down a bogey before a cutscene starts? Good luck finding it again. And of course while the player's avatar picks his nose the Excelsior is still taking damage from the dozens of ships attacking it.

The Bottom Line
For too long Paramount's treatment of the Star Trek license was nothing short of abuse. Star Trek: Shattered Universe is prime evidence that their custody needed to be revoked.