Star Trek: Hidden Evil

No franchise tries more at striking gold in the games market than Star Trek. Find out how the latest attempt fares in our review of Star Trek: Hidden Evil.

A few legendary curses haunt the PC games industry. One claims a good superhero game will never see the light of day. Another taunts that a creative license pinned on a game will help as much as a tick on a dog. No franchise tries more at striking gold in the games market than Star Trek, a statistic befitting the TV series known for optimism. Star Trek: Hidden Evil has the pedigree for success, but ultimately disappoints.

Hidden Evil is an adventure following the events of the feature film Star Trek: Insurrection. The player controls Ensign Sovok, who must assist Captain Picard and Commander Data at an archeological find.

The bulk of the game is a classic adventure in the format pioneered by Sierra's various Quest games. Sovok explores locations, acquires inventory items and clues, and solves puzzles that allow him to advance the game. Some of the puzzles, the meat and drink of an adventure game, are interesting and require thought and attention to the details of the environment. But these good puzzles are few, and a heavy emphasis on pointless combat outweighs them.

Besides optimism, Star Trek usually takes pride in promoting teamwork and elegance in problem solving. Hidden Evil, with a design team that includes developers from The Blackstone Chronicles and Legacy of Time, may surprise players for its lack of strong story and puzzles. Some of the challenges require silly things like key hunts and trial-and-error events. There are certainly opportunities in the game for better. In one sequence, Sovok reprograms a flying robot drone to help him; it's a good idea, but finding and accessing the reprogramming station was a random "look under every rock" discovery rather than a logical conclusion to a string of clues. And the actual programming of the drone is glossed over and given as an automatic gift, when another puzzle would be more entertaining.

The oddest thing is the game's cowboy attitude. Except for one mission where stealth is paramount, most of the adventure involves using Sovok like a lone Wyatt Earp, cannons blazing through the final frontier. Why task an adventure game with such arcade exercises, especially when the interface and the switching camera angles make it harder than necessary? In the final missions, dispatching the unending stream of enemies is tiresome and tedious, not fun or purposeful.

The use of Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner to read the voices of Picard and Data is almost wasted as fringe material, though the voice acting in Hidden Evil is better than average. It's unfortunate when a product with decent production qualities falls short. Hidden Evil's original title of Insurrection was changed to differentiate it from the movie. In truth, it's more like the movie than intended. Despite nice art, special effects, and a glint of potential, it's like most Trek machinations following the Next Generation era- ailing from the curse of mediocrity.

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