Saturday, May 20, 2023

Star Trek Deep Space Nine: The Fallen (2000)

 


I'm not a huge fan of Star Trek beyond the original TV series, so I never watched Deep Space Nine very far beyond the first season or two, but I'm fine with good games based on the shows, and DS9: The Fallen is pretty good.

Made by the Collective, who went on to do a couple of really good Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Indiana Jones games, The Fallen concerns the DS9 crew getting caught up in some Bajoran religious terrorism. An important artifact is stolen from the station and they have to get it back before it's used to do something destructive. Like I said, I didn't watch the show very faithfully so I'm not good for details on how it all works, but the important thing is that it's a well-made third-person action game in which Sisko, Worf, and Kira have to plow through various bad guys. You control one of them throughout the campaign, with Sisko being the primary figure, and then you replay the game with each of the others, which is largely the same but they have access to their own unique stages or portions of common stages. Fortunately, the game is just barely short enough that it all finishes before replaying the same stuff gets tedious.

It's mostly standard TPS stuff, with a little bit of platforming, but at least you don't have to slowly push any very large blocks around, which was a problem for such games around that time. There are rare occasions where you'll face enemies with shields that need to be bypassed by scanning them with the tricorder to determine the shield frequency and then tuning the phaser to that frequency. Amusingly, the phasers are all apparently set to kill only. Worf's default weapon is that Klingon blade he liked to keep around. DS9 crew doesn't mess around.

Between levels you can walk around the station and chat with the supporting cast. Everyone is voiced by the original actors, except for Sisko and O'Brien. The graphics aren't astounding but they're fine in terms of capturing how the series looked and keeping all the action clear and easy to follow.



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