Sight and Sound

Seven!

As far as looks go, this game pulled out all the stops. Even though it fell short of the engine that spawned it, Quake 3, Elite Force was a far cry from being graphically disappointing. Level-wise, this has to be one of the most diverse games I have ever played. The use of the holodeck was utter genius. This allowed the developers to bring in wild-west shootouts and castle fights without causing any major hubbub. The rest of the real levels were no less stunning. Scenery changed from the infamous Borg cube to a Klingon bird of prey. To reveal anymore about locales would just ruin the experience, rest assured you won't be disappointed by the levels, as you romp through space.

If the levels weren't pretty enough, the weapons are chalk full of eye candy. Everything from the Compression Rifle up is a wonder to watch. One of the more notable ones is the Stasis weapon. Check this thing out in the screenshots. It looks like a bit like the symbol from Conan, the two intertwining snakes. This thing ebbs with life as you hold it. When you fire, it's essentially a fireworks show, making all sorts of arcs and colors. The secondary fire is a shotgun version of the first fireworks show, just spectacular.

Just arriving

Oooo

As a side note, I'm probably not the authority on polygon counts or anything but I swear that 7of 9 looked better than the other characters. The character model seemed to be rendered with a little more care, if you know what I mean. Certain areas were just a tad rounder, other areas a wee bit bigger in comparison to the rest of the models. Judge for yourself, I think you might come to the same conclusion.

Things go eek in the dark

Most games don't have music worth listening to, especially the games of old. Recently, game developers have taken to the whole techno scene. For a while it was good, but most seem to be a mix of generic beats. Elite Force tossed all that out and went with a little something some people like to call ambience. The music and sounds all changed depending upon where the battle took place. This added greatly to the feel of the game as a whole. I'm not afraid to admit it, but I was actually shaken at one instance in the game. The music, sounds and level interacted in a way that made me jump up a bit. Really, I'm not afraid to admit this; it makes me a bigger man for admitting that I was afraid. Just read all the girlie magazines, they even say so.

Go towards the light Timmy

He's seen better days

Multi-Player

I wasn't expecting much when I first tried out the online portion of this game. Currently there are two methods of online play: Capture the flag and death match. I tried out death match first; surprisingly, I wasn't too disappointed. I got the usual one would expect out of an online free-for-all, lots of carnage and tons of action. Although, I highly doubt the caliber of players that are present on Q3 or Unreal will ever be seen here. Not really a bad thing if all you want to do is own a couple of people who haven't played any first person shooter but Elite Force.

Manta?

All hail

Capture the Flag was probably more entertaining than death match. The levels contained multiple teleporters, and some fairly ingenious devices. Of note was the portable force field. You could set this up to block incoming enemies in hallways and other assorted areas, adding quite a bit to the fun factor. Aside from that, this version of CTF wasn't all that different from the other already out at the moment. The only shortcoming to the whole multiplayer scene is the lack of levels. Currently, there are only a handful to go around on both death match and CTF; this will probably change with community input.