A bargain Star Trek flight sim with William Shatner's narration!
User Rating: 7.5 | Star Trek: Encounters PS2
I got this at Best Buy yesterday and played the first mission last night. All in all , I was very impressed - especially for a budget title ($14.99). The controls take some getting used to. They tried to pack alot of controls into the Dualshock and every button gets used. They made a very unique way of handling the 3-dimensional aspect of space - using the L1 and L2 buttons for the Y-axis (up/down). The designers could have loosened the game up a bit - you can't save progress until the end of a mission and you are stuck in one Star Trek series until you play all the missions in your current one in order. The good news is that you have unlimited continues (but the game scores them and you have a target number to try to keep under for a rating). Flying through space works pretty well. It's a bit fighter-plane-ish, but not bad since you don't go very fast. The camera had some occasional problems of getitng too close. Missions are broken up into short objectives. If you fail an objective you can play it over, but (as mentioned before) you can't save your progress until the last objective is completed. Objectives were fairly short and not timed (except for a tough 2 minute speed test - took me a few times to get that one). There is a nice generic Star Trek musical score (the kind that plays when when a ship is pulling out of a space dock for the first time) that plays a bit too much, but I'm hoping it changes through the game. It really should change when in battle, but this is a budge title. I'm really looking forward to unlocking more of this game. The graphics are gorgeous and having the ships from all the Star Trek shows (once I get them unlocked) to pilot around is very cool. Weapons and explosions are excellent as well. I would really like to see a cheat or save game that would have all the missions unlocked. (Oh, and yes, Bill does some narration in the game. Something that was left out of the scant promo for this game.) 
