• PowerMac G4 MDD, Dual 1.25GHz, 2MB L3 cache each, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9000 Pro 64MB, Mac OS X 10.3.2
• iBook G4 12", 800MHz G4, 384MB RAM, Radeon 9200 mobility 32MB, Mac OS X 10.3.2

The Story:
StarTrek: Elite Force (the first one) played on the USS Voyager, which was lost in the Delta Quadrant, after having been trapped by an alien race. As a result of the displacement into the Delta Quadrant instead of the Alpha Quadrant, a Hazard Operations team was founded on the Voyager. As a member of this team, you fought your way through a series of unfortunate and dangerous events to rescue the Voyager and its crew.

Elite Force 2 picks up where Elite Force 1 left: The Voyager finds a way to travel back into the Alpha quadrant and everyone is happy to find the crew alive. The Hazard Operations team is disbanded and spread over several new assignments. Only to come together a few years later as a result of a strange alien attack on an Attrexian space station. As it turns out the aliens are bio-engineered creatures once invented by an ancient culture known as hte Idryll, that is now only a small and enslaved group working for the Attrexians. They in turn do everything to cover the Idryll's true origin. While the two parties fight each other in a struggle for thruth, Romulan Rebels take over control of the bio-engineering facilities and endanger the whole Quadrant by unleashing the so called "Exomorphs" on various planets.

The player takes the role of Lt. Munro, leader of the newly reunited Hazard Operations Team and fights its way through a series of dangerous and challenging missions to help resolve the problem the Exomorphs pose to the Region. Base of Operations is now the USS Enterprise under command of Jean-Luc Picard and no longer the Voyager. More shall not be given away here.

The Game:
Elite Force 2 is, as its predecessor, a classical first person shooter. You carry an arsenal of weapons, some of them refreshingly new and interesting to use, by the way, and fight your way through a series of enemies and puzzles that need to be resolved. Like Elite Force 1, the game features very carefully made levels with lots of details and a lot of secrets and eastereggs that can be found, if you want to spend the extra time. These secreat areas often contain small golden "starships" which can be collected. Then there are 7 secret levels that can be accessed once a certain amount of starships has been collected. These levels include short basic combat missions, eastereggs and background information on the making of the game. Definitely worth a look. The game takes quite a while to finish, unlike other games who are over too fast much too often. I found it to be worth my money, and I guess that is what counts! It even throws in some sexyness here and there, which is probably mainly going to attract the male players out there.

Voiceovers and sounds are well done too, at least in the English version. I hope they do not synchronize this, that usually kills the voiceover part entirely.

Gameplay is solid and fun, puzzles are well done, while remaining non-frustrating and the enemies are fairly smart and hard to get. With a newly enhanced Quake3 engine delivering great graphics with full support for Full Screen Anti Aliasing (FSAA) and Anisotropic Filtering (AF), the game also looks great. Having been ported by Westlake Interactive, the game shows a certain experience or routine handling this family of engines. The game is very stable and doesn't behave strangely where you wouldn't expect it to. The only drawbacks I noticed is that the command r_DisplayRefresh doesn't seem to work, forcing you into head-ache inducing 72Hz mode on CRT displays and of course, as I have almost gotten used to by now, the game does NOT support Dual CPUs, even though the r_smp command is there, it just doesn't do anything.

That brings me to the question of game performance. Using default settings on my tower, which means no FSAA, no AF, 800x600 and Medium detail,the game runs flawlessly in almost all situations, ranging from 90+ to 20+ FPS, rarely dropping below 20. On the iBook things looked entirely different, although the iBook still fullfills the minimum system requirements. (733MHz CPU, 256MB RAM, 16MB Radeon or GeForce class GPU (32MB recommended). The game had serious trouble keeping up a playable framerate while combat was going on. Framerates ranged between 10 and 30 FPS often below the 20 FPS mark. Too often actually, even with all graphics options turned off or to minimum. So the iBook G4, otherwise a solid performer in many modern games, seems to have some problems with EF2. I wouldn't recommend anything less than a 1GHz CPU, 512MB RAM and a 64MB graphics card for it to look good and play well.

Apart from that, performance was very acceptable, as I already said. However level load times need to be fixed. For some reason loading a level can take anywhere from 20 seconds to 5 minutes, which is entirely inacceptable in my book. The IBM 120GXP harddrive is a fairly good performer and there is absolutely no reason why loading a map that is only a few dozen megabytes in size should take 5 minutes sometimes and only a few seconds some other times. Having just reviewed Halo, I feel the pain of slow load times particularly irritating, since they're almost non-existant in Halo. So this seems to be the only real bug I found apart from the screenshot function not working on my machine. All shots were simply black, which is why I can't give you any of my own impressions here, too bad.

Multiplayer:
I haven't tried multiplayer a lot, but it's also a very vast field that would have to be looked at, since EF2 has, unlike EF1, quite a lot of options and modes concerning multiplayer. Basically there are the usual Deathmatch, TeamDeathmatch and Capture the Flag modes, plus the Bomb defusion mode, similar to games like Counter-Strike or FragOps. Additionally, all modes can be altered using certain additional sub-modes which include Disintegration (instagib), Action Hero (another form of Tag), Weapon score (weaker weapon kills give more points), Auto Handicap (dominating players are reduced in damage), Control Points (similar to Domination in Unreal Tournament), One Flag (similar to CaptureStrike or oneflag CTF in Quake3), Elimination (Last Man standing), PowerStruggle (a variation of base protection/assault) and Specialities (class based team game with roles each player can take, similar to Quake 3 Fortress).

With that, EF2 is going to be good for the occasional multiplayer game and will surely garner a few die-hard fans, but I doubt it's going to change the way people go about multiplayer first person shooters. It's nice to have, but eventually, the game is about Singleplayer really and it can't detract from that fact. Multiplayer mode is cross-platform compatible.

Verdict:
StarTrek: Elite Force 2 is a great addition to the StarTrek series of games and a must-have for any serious "trekkie". If you're just a first-person lover, you should definitely look closer at this one too, this is an "A" title. Just keep in mind you need a decent machine to have it look great and play great!

Pros:

• StarTrek game (if you're a trekkie, that is)
• solid storyline
• great graphics, especially with some extra options turned on
• stable and solid port
• great SinglePlayer and broad Multiplayer experience
  
  Cons:
  
• load times far too long
• no SMP support
• requires CD in drive to play
• can't force display refreshrate aparently

More Info:
See the Aspyr Elite Force 2 website for screenshots, trailers, system requirements etc.

Post Your Mac Game Review/Ratings:
Elite Force II is one of the games listed in the game review database here. You can post your review/ratings based on performance with your system.