Star Trek: Invasion
The Borg are once again invading Federation space. Their target? Sector 001, Earth. You are part of an elite flying team known as Valkyrie squadron, commanded by none other than Lieutenant Commander Worf of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame. You'll fly through different territories and encounter familiar races from the popular television series, including Klingons, Romulans, Borg and a new enemy known as the Kam'Jahtae. There are twists and turns throughout the game as you protect convoys from enemy attacks, engage galaxy class starships, and go on solo retrieve and rescue missions. The storyline is accented by the voices of actors Patrick Stewart (Captain Jean-Luc Picard) and Michael Dorn (Lieutenant Worf). Your ship is outfitted with phaser cannons and photon torpedoes, both of which you will have to master in order to succeed in your battles with enemy crafts. Users can play from a view behind their ship or from a first-person view inside the cockpit. The game supports analog control as well as force feedback, and uses up one block of memory on the standard PlayStation Memory Card to save progress.
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As fighters aren’t a big thing in Star Trek, this game takes a lot of liberties with the franchise, as every race has suddenly started using fighters, including the Borg. These alien fighters have nice designs, as well as the starting Federation fighter. As you progress though the game, you’ll get new and upgraded fighters which…are quite ugly. That said, the game itself looks really nice, especially for the original PlayStation.
Your ship is equipped with multiple kinds of phasers, so you can have “bullet style” ones or beam ones, although both are slow, so your targeting lock-on displays a marker ahead of enemy ships to show where you need to aim. You can twist, boost and move to the side. I found the controls to work really well and the gameplay is very enjoyable in short bursts, but unfortunately very repetitive if you’re playing though the whole game as there’s not much variety, mostly just blowing up ships. There are a couple of nice set pieces (including a Death Star II attack on a Borg Cube), but it’s mainly just blowing up other fighters.
The story feels like a jumbled mess. While the opening cutscene shows a massive Borg invasion, this is a trivial part of the story, instead it focuses on a mysterious new alien species that have been accidentally awakened by a Federation ship. That said, the story itself jumps around different scenarios, with you dealing with Cardassians, then the Borg, then this new species. The levels don’t flow. In one mission you fight the borg in deep space, the next you protect the Typhon (the carrier ship that transports the fighters) because it has sustained damage in battle, but it’s suddenly falling into a star.
The difficulty of the game also ramps up very quickly, with harsh time limits and some levels with infinitely respawning enemies. If you choose to play on easy difficulty (which still gets challenging), the game stops half way through, telling you to start the game from scratch at a higher difficulty level. On top of this, a lot of missions are hidden behind “secrets”, which the game gives you no hints about. These can be needing to have a certain accuracy rating or finding hidden objects and using the tractor beam on them. One of the secret missions unlocked in this manner is actually a requirement for the ending of the game – miss it and you’ll get a different one.
Invasion is a lot of fun in short bursts, but doesn’t feel much like a Star Trek game – if it wasn’t for Worf being your commander, you would easily forget.