Star Trek (2013 Video Game)

''Star Trek'' is a third-person action-adventure ''Star Trek'' video game. It was developed by Digital Extremes and published by Namco Bandai Games under license by Paramount Pictures in association with CBS Studios International. The game was released in North America on April 23, 2013, for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Microsoft Windows platforms. It took three years to produce, and was the first in-house video game development by Paramount Studios, who opted not to license development to a third party. The production team aimed for it to be a collaboration with those working on the ''Star Trek'' films to avoid the typical pitfalls associated with film tie-in video games. Video games which influenced ''Star Trek'' included the ''Mass Effect'' series, ''Uncharted'' and '' Metroid Prime'', and certain elements of ''Star Trek'' reflected episodes of '' Star Trek: The Original Series'' such as "Arena" and " Amok Time".

The game is set in the ''Star Trek'' Kelvin universe, between the events of the films ''Star Trek'' and ''Star Trek Into Darkness'', and follows the adventures of Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the Starfleet starship USS ''Enterprise''. The player takes control of either Kirk or first officer Spock, and investigates the theft of a terraforming device from the colony of New Vulcan by the Gorn. Together, Kirk and Spock engage the Gorn on away missions, travel to another universe, and re-take ''Enterprise'' when alien forces capture it. This two-character gameplay was seen as a unique element, referred to as "bro-op".

The Gorn, who previously appeared in ''The Original Series'' and '' Star Trek: Enterprise'', were heavily redesigned, with fifteen different classes of creatures created. A replica of the Gorn costume from "Arena" appeared in a viral advertisement alongside William Shatner, which was intended as a homage to the fight between Kirk and the Gorn from that episode. The game was announced at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2012, but was particularly panned by critics upon launch in 2013 and sales were poor. Following an issue with the cooperative mode on the PC upon launch, reviewers also criticized a number of issues such as poor lip syncing, clipping, and bad camera angles.

Gameplay

''Star Trek'' is a single-player third-person shooter action game with cooperative gameplay elements, which allow two players to control Kirk and Spock. When playing in the single-player mode, Kirk and Spock have different paths through the missions in order to encourage re-playability. The game does not allow players to switch between Kirk and Spock during a chapter, although this ability was included in preview versions of the game shown to reviewers prior to launch. It does not allow for fellow players to "drop-in" to play alongside co-operatively. In a similar manner to the ''Gears of War'' series, the game includes a cover system, which protects the player characters from enemy fire.

The two characters show different gameplay techniques, with Kirk being the more typical shooter while Spock has stealth techniques and can use the Vulcan nerve pinch and mind meld. Each character is equipped with weapons to reflect their gameplay style, with Kirk armed with a phaser equipped with a stunning setting, while Spock's weapon is quieter to reflect his stealthier style of play and freezes enemies instead. As players progress through the game, they gain experience allowing them to unlock additional settings for those weapons. In addition to the weapons, the player characters are equipped with tricorders, which are used to interact with the environment and progress plot points.

During the course of the game, players have to fight their way across a number of environments. The first mission sees Kirk and Spock land on the planet New Vulcan; a colony created by Vulcans following the destruction of their homeworld in the 2009 film. There are further types of gameplay in ''Star Trek'' seen in the mini-games that appear throughout, such as those featuring "space dives" as seen in both 2009's ''Star Trek'' and 2013's ''Star Trek Into Darkness''. Other elements of the game break from the third-person shooter style. These include swimming levels that have Spock and Kirk move past obstacles using a teleportation gun, and levels featuring turret-based shooting on board ''Enterprise''. Climbing and platforming are built into the terrain exploration elements of the main game.

Plot

Background

The game takes place within the ''Star Trek'' alternate timeline universe, following 2009's ''Star Trek'' film and before ''Star Trek Into Darkness''. It follows the adventures of Captain James T. Kirk (voiced by Chris Pine) and his crew on board the Starfleet starship, the '' USS Enterprise''. The first film showed Kirk becoming Captain of the ''Enterprise'' for the first time and the formation of the crew, and so the video game shows one of their early missions. The rebooted universe was developed by director J. J. Abrams along with writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman from the 1960s American television series '' Star Trek: The Original Series'' and the six films which followed the crew's adventures.

Story

In 2259, ''Enterprise'' receives a distress call from a space station harvesting the power of a binary star. There is too much interference to beam the crew aboard, so Kirk and Spock (voiced by Zachary Quinto) take a shuttle to rescue the crew. They encounter T'Mar, a childhood friend of Spock, who explains they were gathering energy to power the Helios device, which would speed up the terraforming of New Vulcan; the team inadvertently opened a rip in the fabric of space. Beaming to New Vulcan, Kirk, and Spock meet with T'Mar's father, Surok, who explains the station's power from the base was lost after they were attacked by creatures — who call themselves the Gorn — from the rip. The Gorn infect some of the crew with a virus that makes them aggressive. Kirk and Spock enter the locked-down sections of the base to recover the infected survivors but are unable to stop the Gorn from stealing the Helios device and kidnapping Surok.

Kirk opts to take the infected to a nearby starbase instead of pursuing the Gorn Commander's ship through the Rip. At the starbase, Kirk, Spock, and T'Mar meet with Commodore Daniels, who implies he gave T'Mar the specifications for the device as he knew it would create a wormhole. Suddenly, the Gorn attack the starbase and kidnap T'Mar. Just as he is about to be beamed back aboard ''Enterprise'', Spock tackles the Gorn Henchman, bringing him aboard the ship. Kirk and Spock pursue him to the shuttle bay before he can commandeer a shuttle. Spock mind melds with the Henchman, learning Surok was killed after confessing he has no insight into the device, but that his daughter would. Kirk has the Henchman imprisoned.

Kirk resolves to enter the Rip. After ''Enterprise'' enters the Gorn's galaxy, Kirk and Spock take a shuttle with Sulu (voiced by John Cho) and Dr. McCoy ( Karl Urban) to a nearby planet. When their shuttle is shot down, Kirk and Spock use wingsuits to glide to a Gorn outpost and blow it up before infiltrating a base to rescue T'Mar. They find Daniels, who is killed in an ensuing firefight. The Gorn brings Kirk and Spock to the Commander, who has them taken to an arena to fight his soldiers to the death. Angered by their besting of his champion, the Commander has Spock infected with the virus and pits him against Kirk. Sulu's shuttle arrives and McCoy shoots Spock with an antidote, while the Commander flees to his ship with T'Mar and the device.

The shuttle returns to ''Enterprise'', which has been taken over by the Gorn. Kirk and Spock space dive to engineering and beam McCoy and Sulu back on board. They help Scotty (voiced by Simon Pegg) and Keenser reactivate the warp core, and restore power to sickbay so McCoy can replicate more of the antidote for airborne dispersal. The duo head to the bridge where the Henchman is holding Uhura (voiced by Zoe Saldana) hostage, demanding Kirk give them control of the ship. Kirk responds by directing their shuttle to crash into the view-screen, decompressing the Gorn into space. With only an hour before the Rip closes, Kirk and Spock space dive to the Gorn Commander's ship, where they disable the targeting platform to give ''Enterprise'' a fighting chance and enter the core where T'Mar and the device are being held. Kirk and Spock destroy the device, defeat the Commander, and are beamed back to ''Enterprise'' with T'Mar. ''Enterprise'' warps back to the Milky Way Galaxy before the Rip closes; in their closing logs, Kirk and Spock state T'Mar has recovered enough to continue working on New Vulcan, and that they have been ordered to Nibiru.

Development

Production of ''Star Trek'' began three years before release under Tom Lesinski at Paramount Digital Entertainment. Lesinkski had a background in video game production, having previously worked at companies such as Crystal Dynamics, Ion Storm and Kuju Entertainment. He made the decision to produce a game in-house, rather than licensing it out to a third party as had previously been the case under the previous ten-year Activision contract. As a result, the game was the first to be produced and released by Paramount Studios directly.

Lesinski was terminated by Paramount in September 2011. The project was passed to Brian Miller, Vice President of Paramount Digital Entertainment. Miller later explained that he wanted the production to avoid the mistakes typically made in movie tie-in games involved a lack of time devoted to the production, and excluding the people working on the film from work on the game. Miller hoped that they had rectified these issues with ''Star Trek'', and explained that they had not produced a similar game to tie in with 2009's ''Star Trek'' film because it would have suffered from those problems. He expressed disappointment at the quality of previous in-universe games and wanted the new ''Star Trek'' to be "a triple-A game" and something that the franchise deserved.

The idea for the game came out of a brainstorming session in which it was decided that the game should allow the gamer to play as Kirk and Spock and therefore should be featuring co-op style gameplay. During his E3 pitch, Steve Sinclair described the game's genre as "bro-op". It was created by Digital Extremes, who had previously created video games such as '' Unreal'' and worked on the PlayStation 3 port of ''BioShock''.

The plot of the game was written by Marianne Krawczyk, who had previously worked on games such as ''God of War'' and '' Shank''. She developed the plot in conjunction with the producers of the film, Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci, as well as a writer Damon Lindelof. In an interview in 2011, Orci explained that the storyline of the game was designed to be canon for the new ''Star Trek'' universe. He clarified in 2013 that it was "as close to canon as any ''Star Trek'' game will ever come" as the mission described by the game could have taken place between 2009's ''Star Trek'' and ''Star Trek Into Darkness''. Concept design work for the game was created by artist Fernando Acosta.

While developing the game, the production team sought to use elements of other games as influences on how to create a ''Star Trek'' based game that was along the same lines as the 2009 film. Digital Extremes creative director Sheldon Carter described this as "It's like someone spliced '' Metroid Prime'' into my ''Uncharted''". Miller explained that it was due to the success of the ''Mass Effect'' series of games that allowed for space-based adventure games such as ''Star Trek'' to be made, although they were not seeking to include the role-playing elements seen in that series. Miller explained that there was a "circular influence" with each franchise influenced by the other. Further influences were found in ''The Original Series'', as one level which pits Spock against Kirk was inspired by a similar scene in the episode " Amok Time", originally broadcast on television just under 47 years before the launch of the game. While it was intended to be a cross-platform launch, the producers decided not to incorporate hands-free gaming using either Kinect or the PlayStation Move.

The Gorn

It was decided early on in the development to include the Gorn as the main enemies. At the same time, J. J. Abrams had joked that he was planning to include the aliens in his second ''Star Trek'' film. They had previously been seen in ''The Original Series'' episode "Arena" and the '' Star Trek: Enterprise'' episode "In A Mirror, Darkly", and the producers saw the game as an opportunity to redevelop the lizard race including the addition of fifteen different classes/species.

The official ''Star Trek'' website previewed several of these new types of Gorn, releasing information on a "Gorn Day" each week. The first to be featured were the Gorn Commander and the Sentinel class. These were described as the elite of the Gorn, with only one Commander appearing in the game, while the Sentinels were slightly shorter versions of the same type of Gorn, armed with different weapons. The Gorn Henchman is one of the main antagonist

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