Star Trek (2013 video game)

Did You Know?

• The Gorn were heavily redesigned with fifteen different classes of creatures created.
• The game includes a cover system similar to the Gears of War series.

Plot

Set in the alternate timeline universe introduced by the 2009 Star Trek film, this game follows the early missions of Captain Kirk and his crew aboard the USS Enterprise. In the year 2259, the Enterprise picks up a distress signal from a space station that is drawing power from a binary star. Because of interference, Kirk and Spock travel by shuttle to help. There they find T'Mar, an old friend of Spock's, who reveals the station was fueling the Helios device to speed up terraforming on New Vulcan, but the process accidentally tore a hole in space.

On New Vulcan, T'Mar's father Surok explains that creatures called the Gorn came through the rip and attacked. The Gorn infect some station personnel with a virus that makes them hostile. Kirk and Spock try to rescue the infected but cannot stop the Gorn from stealing the Helios device and taking Surok. Instead of chasing the Gorn ship through the rip, Kirk decides to bring the infected to a nearby starbase.

There, Commodore Daniels hints that he gave T'Mar the device plans, knowing they would create a wormhole. The Gorn then attack the starbase and kidnap T'Mar. Spock grabs a Gorn henchman and brings him onto the Enterprise. After chasing him to the shuttle bay, Spock uses a mind meld to learn that Surok was killed after admitting he knew nothing about the device, but that his daughter does. Kirk orders the henchman locked up.

Development

Production of Star Trek began three years before release under Tom Lesinski at Paramount Digital Entertainment. Lesinski, who had a background in video game production at companies such as Crystal Dynamics, Ion Storm and Kuju Entertainment, decided to produce the game in-house rather than licensing it to a third party, making it the first game produced and released directly by Paramount Studios. Lesinski was terminated by Paramount in September 2011, and the project passed to Brian Miller, Vice President of Paramount Digital Entertainment.

Miller wanted to avoid typical movie tie-in game mistakes, such as insufficient production time and excluding film personnel from game development. He expressed disappointment with previous in-universe games and aimed for Star Trek to be a triple-A game. The idea for the game came from a brainstorming session that decided the game should allow players to control Kirk and Spock with co-op gameplay, which Steve Sinclair described as 'bro-op' during his E3 pitch.

Digital Extremes, previously known for Unreal and the PlayStation 3 port of BioShock, created the game. The plot was written by Marianne Krawczyk, who had worked on God of War and Shank, in conjunction with film producers Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci, as well as writer Damon Lindelof. Orci stated the storyline was designed to be canon for the new Star Trek universe, clarifying it was 'as close to canon as any Star Trek game will ever come'. Concept design work was created by artist Fernando Acosta.

Marketing

The game debuted at the 2012 E3 convention, where the Gorn were revealed as antagonists and reviewers viewed a twenty-minute excerpt of footage in 3D with surround sound. The game was scheduled for release three weeks before Star Trek Into Darkness premiered on May 17, 2013. Brian Miller was heavily involved in promotion, regularly featuring in interviews. After E3, Miller addressed fan concerns that the game would be a straightforward shooter, stating it would include elements of a shooter, exploration, adventure, and discovery.

An in-browser flash social strategy game called Star Trek: New Vulcan Reborn was made by Harkable to promote the game, where players helped develop New Vulcan by building landing pads, founding water treatment centres, and establishing mining rigs. An IGN competition offered prizes to players with the most points; the game is no longer available. The first trailer debuted at the Namco Bandai Global Gamer Day in Las Vegas in April 2012, showing gameplay footage in 3D.

A 2013 trailer featured William Shatner and a man in a Gorn suit playing the game on a console, an idea from Brian Miller and Gene Augusto intended to go viral. The trailer used the line 'not your father's Star Trek' and recreated the fight between Shatner and the Gorn from the episode 'Arena', with Shatner using classic Kirk moves and the Gorn throwing couch cushions. The Gorn outfit was a replica of the original, which had mostly been destroyed except for the head sold at auction in 2006.

Reception

Star Trek was released in the United States on April 23, 2013, and three days later in Europe, coinciding with the theatrical launch of Star Trek Into Darkness. The game sold poorly; after three weeks, 140,000 copies had been sold across all platforms, and it failed to reach the top 100 best video games list of 2013. Critics labelled the game a flop. It received mostly negative reviews, with Metacritic scores of 42 percent for Xbox 360, 43 percent for PC, and 45 percent for PS3.

Dan Stapleton for IGN described it as 'a barely serviceable, paint-by-numbers third-person shooter', criticizing similar playable characters, generic combat, and animation errors including clipping, poor lip-syncing, and scripted events failing to start. He found mini-games mind-numbingly simple and repetitive. Edge magazine said the game had 'more bugs crawling on it than a Fear Factor contestant', citing characters running through walls, enemies becoming immortal, and camera angles showing inside character skulls.

The game was otherwise described as bland, with boring achievement titles and a co-op system that 'succumbs to awkward banter and gimmicky co-op puzzles'.