My Favorite Gaming Hidden Gems, Part Eight: Star Trek Invasion (2000, PlayStation)

I've been playing and collecting video games since the early 1980's, and while there's something to be said for enjoying the greats of the gaming world, there's no better feeling for me than picking out something I'd never heard of, throwing it into my system, and being unable to tear myself away from it because it was just too damn fun. With that in mind, I thought I'd start up a series about my own personal favorite hidden gems of the gaming world to let people know about the unsung, the overlooked, the ignored, and the downright weird niche titles that had no chance of achieving the heights of a Mario, Sonic, or Zelda.

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Zorker's Log, Stardate 54101.02: The release of Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 3D for the Nintendo 64 in 1998 was a warning shot across the bow to PlayStation owners everywhere. It seemed the Star Trek franchise was doomed to relegation in the shadow of this space opera juggernaut. While it is true we saw games like Wing Commander III and Colony Wars which were adequate space combat simulations, the universe of Star Trek was ripe with the trappings for galaxy-spanning combat as the Jem'Hadar, the Dominion, and the Borg encroached into Federation territory. Starfleet's tenuous peace with the Klingon Empire was constantly tested by scheming Romulans, treacherous Cardassians, and money-hungry Ferengi, not to mention a whole host of other enigmatic beings, races, and factions. It may have taken some time, but Star Trek Invasion was just what the Captain ordered...

If you were a fan of the 16-bit Starfleet Academy:Starship Bridge Simulator game like I was, you were probably itching for something else like it, anything else like it, and faced disappointment year after year as the dream of ship-to-ship combat in the Star Trek universe drifted away like the fragments of an exploded photon torpedo. In a way it's understandable: to Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek was always more about exploration and interaction than locking phasers on target. Combat, when it occurred, was never free from consequence and always the last option pursued.

Some of that changed in the aftermath of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, where writer/director Nicholas Meyer approached the story through the lens of "gunboat diplomacy": the Federation was a Navy of sorts, and while on a mission of peace, they were prepared to defend themselves with force if necessary. Wrath of Khan gave us two of the most memorable ship-to-ship battles ever committed to celluloid: Lt. Savvik's Kobayashi Maru encounter with three Klingon attack cruisers--memorable for the confusion it instilled in audiences by seemingly killing off much of the main cast in the first ten minutes--and the USS Enterprise's fateful final encounter with Khan aboard the USS Reliant--memorable for being the white-knuckled space-based equivalent of a 12-round slugfest where both fighters are utterly exhausted but neither side is willing to throw in the towel, which results in the demise of Mr. Spock a second, and not virtual, time.

While future film installments would include exchanges of phaser fire, we didn't see the small-screen equivalent of Kirk vs. Khan until Starfleet's encounter with the Borg in The Next Generation's The Best of Both Worlds, as Riker looked into the view screen at the visage of the Borg-ified Picard staring back and ordered Worf to open fire with the weapon they had designed to obliterate the Borg cube. Since that encounter, and the subsequent devastation at the battle of Wolf 359, there have been other species and races which have presented a danger to the Federation, and even to the Borg, but ultimately if you ask most Star Trek viewers who the scariest enemy in all Trek-dom is, "The Borg" will be the first answer to spring to mind, and if you're going to design a starship combat game set in the Next Gen timeline, the Borg make for the perfect opponents: bargaining is irrelevant, pleading is irrelevant, diplomacy is irrelevant; the only way to stop them is to destroy them, and if you can't accomplish that, you are irrelevant.

Which brings us (finally!) to Star Trek Invasion, the eighth game in my Hidden Gems series. The overarching point of Invasion is that the Borg are, uh, invading en masse. An entire armada of Cubes is headed towards Alpha Quadrant, straight to Sector 001, right down Earth's throat. In the aftermath of events depicted in Deep Space 9 and First Contact, however, the Federation has been preparing for this eventuality. Their latest line of defense includes the new Valkyrie-class of starship: small, maneuverable, rugged, and packing serious firepower, the Valkyrie is a short-range fighter built to make anything attacking the Federation think twice, but especially constructed to harass and overwhelm Borg ships with its arsenal of pulse-modulated energy weapons, missiles, gravitic mines, and quantum torpedoes. You are Ensign Cooper, one of the cadets assigned to the newly-formed Red Squad tactical strike team, and your mission is to familiarize yourself with your Valkyrie's abilities and attain combat readiness before the Borg arrive. Commanded by Lt. Commander Worf and administered under the auspices of none other than Captain Jean-Luc Picard, your choice is simple: prove you have what it takes to be the best of the best, or step aside for someone else who does.

Star Trek Invasion exists as a hidden gem due to its release date more than anything else. Hitting store shelves in June of 2000 meant it arrived just in time to be overshadowed and buried in the hype of the PlayStation 2's impending launch a mere four months later. That's a shame, because in my opinion it's utterly jaw-dropping even today. The graphics are gorgeous with high-polygon-count models placed against gorgeously-rendered backdrops of stars, moons, planets, black holes, asteroid fields, nebulae, and other amazing stellar phenomena, and battles which incorporate a diverse array of lighting and particle effects for which the PlayStation hardware is known, to say nothing of the nearly ten minutes of great quality FMV stuffed on the disc. The frame rate never jitters, never dips, no matter how hairy the action gets. The controls take some getting used to, but after the first few practice missions will become second-nature and you'll find yourself boosting, braking, swapping weapons, and strafing to avoid incoming fire automatically. Voice work is exceptional, with Michael Dorn and Patrick Stewart voicing their iconic characters, and the rest of the actors doing a fine job conveying the lines of Romulans, Cardassians, and other aliens as well as your squad mates since the Valkyries are built to work together in teams of two or three. Effects are pulled straight from the films and television, so your phasers, tractor beam, quantum torpedoes, and other equipment sound just as they should.

The story is beautifully convoluted, with the pending Borg invasion becoming a secondary concern as the Valkyries and their staging ship the USS Typhon are dispatched throughout the sector to do everything from escorting a medical frigate through a warzone and disabling a Cardassian thief to defending the Typhon as it repairs itself and investigating the Kam'Jahtae, a new species of belligerent insectoid who believe they were the first race in the galaxy and all others must be exterminated. As if all that isn't enough, a starship captain has gone rogue and is seemingly dead-set on igniting a war between the Federation and the Romulan Star Empire, and it just so happens your group is the only one in the area who can track him and his ship, the USS Sentinel, down and figure out what the hell's wrong with Captain Brennan. Then there are your usual, run-of-the-mill jobs like rescuing a ship's crew from the pull of a black hole, collapsing a wormhole being used by the Kam'Jahtae to cause mischief in other parts of the galaxy, stealing the transwarp coil out of a Borg vessel(!), and manning a gun turret aboard the Typhon when a sneak attack is so swift there isn't time to deploy the Valkyries.

Oh well...nobody ever said command was easy.

Star Trek Invasion is a monstrously fun PlayStation exclusive which brought the action of space combat in the Star Trek universe in line with similar titles from George Lucas's playground. If you ever played X-Wing, Tie Fighter, or Rogue Squadron and wondered what transplanting those games into a Star Trek setting would look like, wonder no more. There's even a two-player mode where you can dogfight with a buddy under various conditions in between the thirty different single-player missions to save Alpha Quadrant. If your interest in Star Trek runs more towards the adventure-and-diplomacy aspect of things, Invasion will not be your cup to tea (Earl Grey; hot). On the other hand, if the idea of dog-fighting with a Borg cube twenty times your size sets off your itchy trigger finger, copies of this game are extremely inexpensive and there's never been a better time for you to acquire one than today.

Make it so.

Or, if you can't bear to leave your house to discover what all the fuss is about, but have four hours to kill, you can watch a complete playthrough of the game right here, courtesy of the 'World of Longplays' YouTube channel:

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So, in all the excitement, you missed the previous entries in this series? It's all good, friend. No need to attempt time travel or anything else so drastic, just plug these links into any LCARS-compliant terminal or upload them to your tricorder:

• Part One: Snoopy and the Red Baron
• Part Two: Dark Summit
• Part Three: Metal Marines
• Part Four: Theresia
• Part Five: Obscure
• Part Six: Dungeons & Dragons: Eye of the Beholder
• Part Seven: Everblue 2

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