Video Game / Star Trek: Elite Force

The Hazard Team... and Tuvok

"SET PHASERS TO FRAG!"

— tagline for the first game

From the fine folks at Raven Software and Ritual Entertainment, a pair of FPS games set in the Star Trek: Voyager universe. It follows the adventures of a beefed-up redshirt squad who tackle assignments and challenges too tough or dangerous for standard Starfleet away teams. There have been two games (plus one expansion) in the series:

• Star Trek: Voyager Elite Force (2000, Raven Software^*macOS port by Aspyr Media, PlayStation 2 port by Pipe Dream Interactive)

Stranded in the far reaches of the galaxy, the USS Voyager is in a precarious predicament, and Federation rules might not apply. And so, Chief of Security Lt. Tuvok takes it upon himself to form the Hazard Team, a rigorously-trained group of bona fide space marines who can handle the toughest and most dangerous missions. And that expertise will be needed forthwith; Voyager finds herself ensnared in a starship graveyard, unable to escape. The Hazard Team must travel from ship to ship, searching for clues (and fighting off hostile aliens), and find a way to free Voyager.

• The economically-titled Star Trek Voyager Elite Force Expansion Pack (2001), in addition to more multiplayer arenas and modes, added two noteworthy features to the original game: Jeri Ryan returned to voice Seven Of Nine (another voice actor had originally voiced the part; the Expansion Pack copied Ryan's voice work over the replacement's); and "Virtual Voyager Mode" allowed the player to explore the interior of the Starship Voyager, collecting items and partaking in RPG-ish mini-adventures.invoked

• Star Trek Elite Force II (2003, Ritual Entertainment)

Picking inside the climax of Voyager's Grand Finale, the Hazard Team's first mission involves freeing Voyager (again) from a Borg sphere so that she can return triumphantly to the Alpha Quadrant. You'll all be heroes—

Oops, upon returning to Starfleet, the first thing that happens is the disbanding of the Hazard Team. Fortunately for Alex Munro, he catches the eye of one Jean-Luc Picard, who promptly reforms the Hazard Team and transfers them to the Federation flagship, the Enterprise-E. And just in time, too — there seems to be some sort of invasion of strange, savage aliens. Tracking these aliens to their source will lead Munro and his team to lost alien civilizations, ages-old feuds, the Alpha Quadrant's seedy underbelly, and good old fashioned political intrigue. All while blasting savage aliens to protoplasm.

These were, for a long time, generally regarded as the best of the Star Trek video games, especially of the large wave that came in the period between 1998's Insurrection and 2002's Nemesis; they still may not capture that wonder of exploration and the moral questions that Trek is famous for, but they capture the rollicking action and adventure of the movies very well. Even today, they're still very solid shooters that manage to translate what was seen on the shows into good gameplay, although the id Tech 3 engine has not aged as gracefully as some other games, particularly in the first game's case. Elite Force I is notable for being one of the first third party games to use the Quake III engine, while Elite Force II also has the distinction of being one of the last major FPS to use the Quake III engine - the only other high-profile games to use it afterwards being Call of Duty and Everything or Nothing - and is probably the most advanced example of a game on that engine.

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These video games provide examples of:

Both Games

• Achievement Mockery: The Red Shirt award is awarded in a multiplayer game to those who manage to die most.
• Adaptive Ability: The Borg. If you choose to use any non-I-Mod weapon on them, they'll adapt. And naturally, the first level in both games has you sneaking around them without an I-Mod.
• Alternative Continuity: Like all Star Trek Expanded Universe material, it exists outside of proper continuity. The story is carefully designed, however, to fit cleanly into the shows and movies involved without contradicting anything presented there (although the sequel's opening mission on the Borg sphere seems to take some time, while the actual episode suggested that Voyager had not been trapped for more than a few minutes). The distinct lack of the I-Mod weapon in the TV series does stand out, however.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: The I-Mod in Holomatch punches through the personal shields of your target, it will even damage them through Metaphasic Shielding.
• Ascended Extra:
  • Chell, one of the series' major characters, started as a extra with a few lines of dialogue on a couple episodes of Voyager. He's even played by the same actor. In the first game, at least.
  • Jurot is semi-ascended. Her name was listed as a Betazoid crewmember in "Counterpoint" and while never explicitly seen, that same episode did feature a female character, only seen from the back, who might've inspired the character's design.
  • In "Waking Moments", the Doctor also mentions a Crewman Foster; who's to say whether he made his way to Lieutenant in a couple of seasons?
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The alt-fire on the phaser rifle instantly disintegrates anything it hits, short of a boss or the giant robots fought on the Dreadnought. It also uses up a whopping 40 units of energy per shot, whereas the primary fire only uses up 2 energy per shot and kills most enemies with 3 or 4 shots. The grenade launcher or photon torpedo launcher both can One-Hit Kill most enemies just as well, while using up less energy.
  • The photon torpedo launcher itself can be this on the Harder Than Hard difficulty, where ammo is much more scarce. It uses up twice as much energy as the grenade launcher, while dealing only slightly higher damage. Overall, the grenade launcher is the most ammo efficient Federation weapon in the game, and will be your go-to Federation weapon on Harder Than Hard for anything except the Borg.
• Bottomless Pits: A frequent hazard in both games.
• Disintegrator Ray: As expected, Phased Energy Rectification has a tendency do do this. The Secondary Fire on both the Hand Phaser and Compression Rifle does this to most enemies as does the Sniper Rifle in the sequel.
• Escort Mission: Most of the time your team mates are practically invulnerable outside of certain events such as having to defend Seven of Nine as she attempts to override a command console on the Borg Cube which results in a Non-Standard Game Over of her being re-assimilated should you fail but afterward, she's treated as being invulnerable. Elite Force II seems to display this more NPCs are considered invulnerable until you get a meter on the left side of your screen showing their health.
• Gameplay Ally Immortality: Partially. All of your teammates are normally impervious to enemy fire, but may suddenly become vulnerable if the plot calls for it — they either get taken out during a cutscene, or simply lose their invulnerability to enemy fire. Some (Biessman, Lathrop) will always die, while the fate of others (Foster, O'Dell, Nelson, Csatlos) depends on the player's actions.
• Gatling Good: Both games feature an energy minigun, and for some reason, both have "tetryon" in the name. The Tetryon Disruptor is a Hirogen weapon in EF1, and the Tetryon Gatling gun is a Klingon weapon in EF2. In both cases you get it after defeating a Duel Boss in a shootout and they both fire Pinball Projectiles as their Secondary Fire. Although you find it earlier in the former game and later in the latter.
• Healing Factor: Somewhat justified: Munro's hazard suit is laced with healing nanites, which will repair physical damage when provided energy from a health station.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: Justified in that your weapons and items are stored in a "transporter buffer" and are literally transported into your hands as you need them.
• It's Up to You: Even when you have teammates, you have to accomplish most of the objectives yourself (though your team will fight enemies with some degree of skill, which AI-wise was actually new and rather impressive at the time).
• Lower-Deck Episode: Not an episode per se, but it plays out like one. The plot and action follow the titular Elite Force, with the main cast and crew relegated to supporting status
  • In 1, a few main characters, like Tom Paris and Chakotay, barely make cameos. Only Tuvok and Seven Of Nine play significant roles. This was in part dictated by the licensing contract. None of the established Voyager crew were allowed to have even the possibility of dying in the game. Therefore, the developers made up a new team of characters to kill off.
  • A different form of this occurs in the Virtual Voyager mode where you find Andrew Dischler assigned to Deck 15, reading his logs shows how bored and isolated he becomes working down there, Chakotay and even Captain Janeway herself doesn't even know what he's really supposed to do (outside of lowering the landing gear during Blue Alerts which happens three times in the whole series). Sanity Slippage starts to develop until he eventually programmed a Smash TV styled top down shooter where he rescues Seven of Nine from the Borg.
  • Much the same, of course, for being a Hazard team on the Enterprise in 2. Captain Picard and Worf delegate to you.
• Ludicrous Gibs: As ludicrous as you can get with Bloodless Carnage, at least. Anyone receiving a direct hit from a grenade or caught in the blast of a Photon Burst torpedo disintegrates with a spray of similarly disintegrating gibs.
• Mauve Shirt: The members of the Beta Hazard Team are individually named and have unique models, but receive much less characterization and are overall more generic compared to the Alpha Hazard Team main characters. Often, they can live or die based on your actions during each mission, though the sequel seems to assume they lived as they can be seen in minor mentions in text logs and the like.
• Nerfed: The Borg, thanks to the Infinity Modulator which can shoot through their shields. This is addressed in Elite Force II, where you lose the I-Mod for a decent portion of the Borg levels, forcing you to use your standard weapons until the Borg adapt to them, at which point you need to run the hell away. Or you could let your team mates shoot the Borg and just hide behind them. The Borg never seem to adapt to your ally's weapons. However, it seems that only works if your team mates are using a weapon that the Borg haven't already adapted to your use of.
• Primary-Color Champion: As you can tell from the above picture, there really is no clear reason for why the Hazard team must wear red uniforms, particularly since their old-clad CO, Tuvok, falls squarely under the security department or Chell (who seldom appears in the series proper), who's part of Engineering. But no one is going to shell out fifty bucks to play as a goldshirt, particularly with their history. This is changed in the sequel, giving them their proper shoulder colors during Endgame and collar colors post-Endgame.
• Professional Slacker: The stock quotes for random characters do not consider their current activity. So, you can click on a random crewman standing idle in the lounge room, or Chell while he's just sitting there, and will reply things like "Sorry, kind of busy here", "Can't you see I'm working?" and even "Sorry, I don't have time for chit-chat."
• Punch-Packing Pistol: The basic hand phaser's secondary fire is extremely powerful, vaporizing most enemies in under a second of sustained fire. The battery only carries enough charges to vaporize about 4 or so enemies before running dry, but it recharges automatically at a decent rate.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: Alex (-ander or -andria) Munro, the player character, in EF1; in EF2 Alex was made canonically male.
• Quad Damage: The Quantum Weapon Enhancer in Holomatch, right down to the blue glow and electrical noise with each weapon shot.
• Ranged Emergency Weapon: Your phaser constantly regenerates its battery, and while the primary fire is fairly weak, the secondary fire is remarkably powerful and can vaporize most enemies in half a second. However, it only holds enough energy to vaporize a few enemies before running out and having to take several seconds to recharge.
• Red Shirt:
  • Although not strictly but the final mission analysis when you die may ask. "What color shirt were you wearing?"
  • Players who have died the most in a multiplayer holo-match are also awarded "The Redshirt Award".
• Remember the New Guy?: In a sense. The manual says that Munro served on the Enterprise-D before transferring over to Voyager, and in Fem!Munro's quarters you can find a picture of her with Worf^note Male!Munro has a picture of a rugby team instead. Running counter to this trope, in Elite Force II Picard doesn't recognize Munro and Worf never shows up with Tuvok temporarily taking charge of security onboard the Enterprise.
• Secondary Fire: Every weapon across both games has a form of it in at least each category.
• Stealth-Based Mission: notable in that failure at stealth will not result in a Non-Standard Game Over, but will result in the death of a teammate.
• Suspicious Videogame Generosity: When you find a power-up that maxes out both of your ammo types, you know the final boss is just ahead.
• Techno Babble: It wouldn't be Star Trek without it!
• Timed Mission: There's a number of them for a commendable variety of reasons. An ally under attack with health whittling down, another one captured and about to undergo conversion to Borg, the entire ship about to blow up unless you stop it... The entirety of the final boss fight of the first game runs on a (generous) timer.
• Universal Ammo: Ammo is divided into two types; Federation weapons and Alien weapons. Run out of Federation ammo and all your Federation weapons become empty, likewise with Alien ammo.
• Wretched Hive: The Scavenger Base, a space station full of mercenaries in EF2.
• Zerg Rush: A common tactic for enemies. The Etherians, Borg, 8472, and Harvesters/Reavers all rely on this. The native insects and exomorphs in the second game also use this tactic.

Elite Force

• Adaptational Badass: The Doctor is Immune to Bullets (his Mobile Emitter can't be damaged, either), being a hologram, but somehow possesses a real phaser that does real damage, making him effectively invincible yet capable of dealing damage. He's normally not involved in combat during the normal course of the game, but if you start a fight around him or using the PC console to spawn in hostile NPCs near him, he can really kick ass.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Vorsoth are biologically programmed things, convinced their programming is to tear apart any alien they encounter to make deadlier Vorsoth. Munro tries to suggest their creators probably didn't intend for them to be like this, but the head Vorsoth isn't hearing any of it.
• All Crimes Are Equal: You get a Non-Standard Game Over for various acts of massive insubordination, in which you get sent to the brig and a random member of the crew chews you out for your behavior. What's weird is that the "severity" of the dialogue varies wildly between each character, and is not impacted by what your actual crime was. It's entirely possible for Ensign Kim to call you a traitor for loitering on the bridge after being ordered to go elsewhere, or for Foster or Paris to tell you you'll be out in 30 days and given a second chance after you go nuts and vaporize Neelix and a dozen redshirts with a handheld photon torpedo launcher.
• Artificial Brilliance: The first Elite Force was one of the first FPS games, if not the first, to incorporate friendly A.I. NPCs for most of the game's gameplay time (you spend about 80% or more of the game with buddies following you). Earlier games had friendly npcs, i.e. Barney from Half-Life, but they generally only appeared sparingly and were usually limited to small areas due to problems getting the A.I. to follow the player from room to room. Granted, this was partially accomplished by making the levels relatively linear so the friendly A.I. wouldn't get confused.
• BFG: In the first game, there's an entire starship that serves as one of these. And it's your job to fire it.
• Big Bad: The Vorsoth in EF1 are the primary antagonists, proving dangerous even to the Borg.
• Bottomless Magazines: The original Elite Force runs on the idtech 3 engine so all weapons run directly off of their ammunition pools.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: The Vorsoth is a giant spider/slug thing.
• Big Damn Heroes: In EF1, at seemingly the worst part of a Zerg Rush (and immediately following the Heroic Sacrifice).
• Boss in Mook Clothing: The "Warthog" bipedal repair drones on the Dreadnought level in the first game.
• Brown Note: Just hearing the Vohrsoth's voice is enough to cause everyone physical pain.
• Camera Spoofing: During the mission to deactivate the Forge's outer defenses, Chell uses a more technical version of this to do so: extrapolating sensor data to create a simulation of the derelict field's normal drifting.
• The Cavalry: The Etherians during the Final Boss in Elite Force 1.
• Combat Stilettos: When Seven of Nine joins the Hazard Team on a mission and dons the same protective gear as everyone else, her boots include high heels. None of the regular female members of the Hazard Team have those. This is probably caused by the new costume being done as just a reskin of her regular silver catsuit model, which (accurate to the show) also has high heels.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In Virtual Voyager, you can visit the bottom deck of the ship, and meet the person who handles lowering Voyager's landing gear when it actually descends onto the surface of a planet. He also complains about not having any work to do. This feature of Voyager was used about three times over the course of the entire series. This character actually appeared in an episode of the show, too.
  • In the Virtual Voyager Holodeck, the "Tranquil Garden" scene features Boothby, and if you attack him, he transforms into an 8472.
  • When you visit sickbay for the Doctor to heal you, he recommends an analgesic cream.
• Cutscene Incompetence: Toward the end of the first game, the entire team just stands there unable to handle a few mooks which Munro had easily been mowing down just seconds ago, so Biessman can make a Heroic Sacrifice.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: The final boss of the first game takes almost your entire stockpile of ammo to defeat (and this is after you get a massive ammo upgrade just prior to the final fight); this is particularly notable as every other enemy in the game only takes a handful of hits to bring down. Even the midterm boss that you meet at the end of the Scavenger missions doesn't require more than about 8 grenades to kill.
• Deadpan Snarker: Tuvok was one of these on the show. In the first game, he delivers this magnificent line after the first mission: "Mr./Ms. Munro, your tactical approach was, shall we say, tactless."
• Deal with the Devil: On the Borg Cube, the team is forced to agree to help them get rid of their Species 8472 problem, with the threat of assimilation if they don't. Of course, the Borg plan to assimilate them when they're done anyway... but the team thought ahead, and leave a bomb behind on the viniculum.
• Degraded Boss: The first giant robot you fight on the Dreadnought is introduced in a cutscene and takes almost as many grenades to put down as the Hirogen Alpha did. The ones that show up later as regular enemies have less than half as much health as the first one did.
• Derelict Graveyard: The setting of EF1. Not all the ships are completely derelict, but with a jamming field in place, no one's going anywhere any time soon.
• Destruction Equals Off-Switch: Averted. In the first game's opening tutorial simulation, when Alex is unable to deactivate the force fields holding the rest of the team by using the nearby console, s/he shoots it in hopes that will cause it to deactivate. The console instead just explodes spectacularly, taking out the entire team and ending the simulation.
• Diabolus ex Machina: The end of the Scavenger levels. Hooray, you've successfully navigated your way around the entire ship, avoided getting killed by the Scavengers, and (if you're clever enough) prevented one of your crewmembers from dying, having successfully gained the Isodesium the crew neede- hey, where'd those Borg come from?! Biessman literally says this. "The Borg aren't supposed to be here! How'd the Borg get here?!?"
• Difficult, but Awesome: The grenade launcher is quite a bit harder to use compared to the portable photon torpedo launcher, due to the arc and bounce on the grenades, but it deals comparable damage while draining much less ammo, making it particularly helpful on the higher difficulties where ammo resupplies give you less energy.
• Dramatic Space Drifting: Jumping out of the hull breach that was used to beam your team into the dreadnought gunship results in a Non-Standard Game Over of Munro slowly floating away from the breach as the camera pans out and the screen goes dark to the mission failure screen, same for if they fall off the docking ring just outside of the Forge in the final mission where they flail about.
• Dwindling Party: The Etherian mission. One by one your teammates are killed or vanished by the strange security devices and hostile aliens on the weird ship, eventually leaving just you and Foster. Then at the end of the mission it turns out they weren't killed, just put in stasis.
• Easily Forgiven: Monroe and company after The Etherian Mission. Justified in that it's a case of "No harm, no foul" No one actually died despite everything due to their emergency stasis system.
• Eldritch Starship: The Etherian starship just looks plain weird, even without the organic tech, the floors that apparently kill you, and the hordes of aliens rushing at you. Fortunately, the owners are actually quite nice.
• "Everybody Laughs" Ending: Elite Force:
  Captain Janeway: Why, Tuvok, is that pride I hear in your voice?
  Lt. Tuvok: Captain, I see no reason to insult me.
  [everybody laughs]
• Eviler than Thou: The Reavers to the Borg in EF1; not only are they even more dangerous, 7 of 9 points out that the Borg are pursuing perfection and genuinely believe they benefit the species they assimilate, while the Reavers' sole goal is to destroy all inferior life forms (in other words, anything not a Reaver). In fact, the Borg were originally supposed to teleport in and help you fight the final boss, but that was cut from the final product. Instead, the Etherians help out, which makes a little more sense anyway, since you'd allied with them. In the comic adaptation of the game, released before the game itself, the Borg do come and help out, and the Etherians are removed entirely. There are occasional hints that this was the final plan (including a line that comments on how Foster was assimilated, when he was rescued earlier).
• Evil Gloating: The Vorsoth is really dense with that. Puny Earthlings, Evil Laugh, Fate Worse than Death threats, And Your Little Dog, Too!, Prepare to Die, You Have No Chance to Survive, Nothing Can Stop Us Now!... and when the seed is destroyed, Big "NO!", This Cannot Be! (literal), You'll Pay For This!. Even when the monster died, he was Defiant to the End.
• Evil Sounds Deep: The Vorsoth has an incredibly deep, echoing voice.
• Explosive Instrumentation: Essential to any Star Trek work. The intro level to the first game ends with Munro blasting a force field controlling console and killing both him/her and his/her teammates.
• Expy: The Stasis Weapon is one to the Ethereal Crossbow with the primary trigger firing one large shot with a smaller shot on each side.
• Face Death with Dignity: The Hirogen Alpha at the end of the mission to the Scavenger Base considers Munro to be a Worthy Opponent before the boss fight. After defeating him, he declares them the victor and while they try to stabilize him, he insists that they are the victor and gives them the Tetryon Disruptor.
• Gang Up on the Human: The developers of the first game openly admitted resorting to this. It's tricky to strike a balance between allies being too good and killing most of the enemies and being too inefficient and getting killed themselves constantly. The solution was found in this trope.
• Guns in Church: The Voyager crew doesn't seem to mind you carrying that photon burst around the halls of the ship. Not even Paris minds you carrying Captain Proton's laser that you found in his quarters. It isn't until you frag someone. Justified, given that you're a Red Shirt in an emergency situation.
• Have a Nice Death: The post-mission report screen upon death in the first Elite Force would mock you in various ways, ranging from "What color shirt were you wearing?" to "Even Neelix could do better."
  • If Alexandria Munro gets assimilated by the Borg, one of the messages is "Now you and Seven of Nine have more than one thing in common."
• Heroic Sacrifice: Beissman in Elite Force.
• Hold the Line: One of the most important missions forces you to do this.
• Holodeck Malfunction: Oddly non-present in a Star Trek based game. It's implied the safety locks are in place in any of the holodeck programs in the main story and Virtual Voyager (excluding the beginning Borg mission as not to spoil it being a simulation in the first place), while "dying" does bring up the mission failure screen, pressing any button will respawn you as if you were in multiplayer (a nice touch of in-universe flavor that was oddly absent from the sequel.) The only time this happens is in the first game's Virtual Voyager mode when you attempt to use a relaxation program, the safety locks disengage and you wind up facing Biohulks until you exit the simulation.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Biessman in Elite Force loves teasing Chell and is generally a hotheaded Jerk Jock but ultimately makes a Heroic Sacrifice.
• Joke Item: In Virtual Voyager Mode.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Biessman, who for most of the game is an arrogant, aggressive Non-Action Guy, finally steps up to the plate and singlehandedly clears out a Zerg Rush; unfortunately, he exposes himself to enemy fire while doing so. While everyone around him basically just stares at the scene with their mouths wide open, rather than helping out Biessman since they, you know, have guns that kill things.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: The PS2 version of the first game can take several minutes between levels.
• Meaningful Echo: At the Gunship mission, Chell opened a locked door that the scavengers could not open. "I wouldn't be much of a technician if I couldn't open a door". Later, there's a new locked door, and Chell was left behind on the bridge (much to his relief). Chang blew up it with an explosive. "I wouldn't be much of a demolitionist if I couldn't blow up a door"
• Mile-Long Ship: The dreadnought gunship is stated to have a barrel 700 meters in length which doesn't even take into account the core and drive section at the back, meaning it could easily be a kilometer in length.
• Mood Whiplash: After the mission to the Borg cube. Everything's quiet and Voyager seems to be in the clear with the Isodesium, so Ensign Munro, after blowing up Klingons in the Holodeck, goes down to the mess-hall for a talk with Telsia. Then a crew-member sees something moving outside the ship. Moving towards Voyager.
• Ms. Fanservice: The female Mirror Universe crew uniforms.
• Nobody Poops: True to the show, crew quarters have a shower but noticeably no toilet, unless it folds out of one of the drawers (which, given Star Trek technology, isn't impossible).
• Non-Standard Game Over: Being defeated by the Borg in Elite Force results in a quick cutscene of you getting assimilated. Likewise, killing your crewmates or team members, or disobeying orders, results in you being thrown in the brig and chastised by a random member of the Voyager cast.
• Nostalgia Level: Part of the Scavenger base is a Mirror Universe TOS-era ship. And wouldn't you know, it's the exact same make as the Enterprise.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The Borg in Elite Force are cut off from the Collective, and acting more aggressive. They'll even shoot at you from a distance, rather than lumbering up to you like usual. This is an adaptation made due to both the Harvesters and Species 8472 proving resistant to assimilation.
• Optional Stealth: Gathering the isodesium in the Scavenger base. If you don't bother, or screw it up, you get a member of the team killed because you blew their cover.
• Organic Technology: The Etherians in EF1 have a very gooey, purple ship with odd systems that allow them to teleport around the ship instantly and fireflies that heal broken components of the vessel. Virtual Voyager reveals the stasis fireflies can repair even non-organic equipment it deems as broken.
• Outrun the Fireball: see Video Game Cruelty Potential, below.
• Pardon My Klingon: At one point in the Scavenger base, you can actually hear a Klingon call a Malon a "p'etaq", only to be acidly informed that the person they're calling such knows what it means.
• Poor Communication Kills: As it turns out, the Etherians were attempting to detain the Hazard team during their first encounter due to mistaking them for an invading force and any attempts at communication failed due to the Etherians not being able to translate the human language until the very end of the level. Thankfully the "kills" part is inaccurate however, as Etherians have a security system in place to pull them back to their stasis pods to recuperate in the event that they nearly die. They extend this courtesy to the Hazard team as well.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: The Hirogen Alpha and the Vohrsoth itself both put up a considerable fight. Averted with the Terran and Klingon captains, the former being no tougher than a regular Mook and the latter being a case of Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Alex ignores Tuvok's demands to return to take care of things him/herself.
• Shout-Out: B'elanna mentions a "resonance cascade" in ambient dialogue in engineering, a shout out to Half-Life.
• Starfish Aliens: The Etherians in Elite Force are floating manta-rays with anteater-like heads.
• Storming the Castle: The final assault on The Forge in Elite Force.
• Stupidity Is the Only Option: The Unwinnable Training Simulation in the first game ends with you shooting a console in an attempt to shut off a forcefield. Naturally, the resulting EPS backfire kills you and your team.
• Tele-Frag: Once again, the first Elite Force runs on idtech 3 so two entities attempting to occupy the same physical space results in a Teleporter Accident.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: The Vorsoth are unassimilatable in the same way as Species 8472.
• Trapped in Containment: While traversing decks to reach engineering, a crewman shouts to make you raise a forcefield to stop an explosion from blasting the deck. If you use the nearby control panel too early, said crewman is trapped behind said forcefield and will die. This is then followed where you need to use another control panel to stop an electrical surge, and do so as soon as possible.
• Tuckerization: Much like Battlezone (1998), also by Activision, many of the names of the characters created for the first game comes from the names of the development team.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Downplayed with the Scavenger base in Elite Force, the Starfleet section is actually a Mirror Universe vessel.
  Telsia: It looks like a Federation ship, 23rd century, but I don't recognize these markings.
  Foster: This is not an archaeological expedition. Just get the isodesium and get out!
• Unwinnable Training Simulation: The introductory tutorial in the first game.
• Video Game Caring Potential:
  • Saving Foster from assimilation is one of the more heart-warming examples.
  • It's possible to save two members of Beta team from dying, though it does require you to expose yourself to more danger.
  • Throughout the whole game there are chances to save crew members and hazard team members from certain death but doing so requires a lot more challenge, not getting caught during stealth segments, or exposing yourself to more danger.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • On one level of EF1, you must erect a force field to contain an explosion; however, if you erect it too soon, you'll trap a fellow crewman in with the blast. Possibly a Call-Back to the Voyager episode "Year of Hell", when the Doctor has to close a bulkhead before two crewmen can make it to safety before an explosion.
  • It is entirely possible to shoot any member of the Voyager crew, like Neelix for example, in the face with a mobile torpedo launcher. Or vaporize them. Or arc weld them. Or give them a face full of tetryon radiation.
  • In the expansion you can give yourself the highest command priority then rig the ship to Self Destruct while Kim and Chakotay freak out.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Of course if you do take the opportunity to frag anyone, the Voyager crew instantly turn on you. And God Mode gets turned off.
• Villain Override: If you manage to save Foster on the Borg Cube, Seven of Nine gets taken over by the Borg Cube, rather than having them speak through Foster.
• Wave-Motion Gun: The Dreadnought ship in EF1 is basically a massive mobile railgun. The Hazard Team is assigned to repair it so they can destroy a Reaver probe on its way to dismantle Voyager.
• What the Hell, Player?:
  • If you decide to go on a psychotic rampage in Virtual Voyager, you get beamed to the brig, where a random character will walk up and more or less ask "WTF dude?"
  • Hell, you could activate the self-destruct sequence and get this from everyone on the bridge. Chakotay would invoke it almost word-for-word.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The plot for Voyager episode "The Void" is suspiciously similar to the first game. In this case, Elite Force came first by a narrow margin. Oddly enough, the game actually references that episode despite coming first.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: Virtual Voyager mode.
• The Worf Effect: Species 8472 is practically a joke in Elite Force, while the Borg still have trouble with them on their disabled cube, Seven's simple handwave of having modified their weapon designs since "Scorpion" and "In The Flesh" makes them laughably easy as the only thing they can do is charge straight at you and slash you with no other unique attack along with the fact you're no longer constrained to your I-Mod and can mow them down with the Tetryon Disruptor, there's not even any psychic attacks nor are you infected if they get into melee range (though the hazard suit could be neutralizing virulent cells). Star Trek Online or even Star Trek: Armada II gave them a more proper treatment.
• You No Take Candle: The Etherians from EF1. Justified in that they quite literally finished a rough translation of the human language right before you first talk to one and they clearly haven't had the time nor the resources to get it super accurate.

Elite Force II

• Artistic License – Physics: Well, it is Star Trek... But specifically, modulating a waveform with the tricorder has one simple mistake: Increasing the frequency also increases wavelength, when it should actually decrease the wavelength.
• Badass Boast: A particularly un-Starfleet one:
  "I'm amazed you were able to make it this far."
  "Yes, climbing over all those alien corpses was... inconvenient."
• Based on a Great Big Lie: The Attrexians insist that they uplifted the Idryll from savagery as part of their claim on numerous worlds that the latter formerly colonized. The Idryll, of course, were a once-powerful star empire.
• Betty and Veronica: Telsia and Kleeya respectively in the second game. One is your teammate and a Space Marine while the other is a Green-Skinned Space Babe scientist.
• Big Bad: Romulan Commander Suldok and the Archeopendra.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Krindo the Idryll thinks he can use the Exomorphs to destroy the Attrexians, steal the Federation flagship, and marry Kleeya. To his credit, unlike most examples, when he inevitably fails, rather than double-down on his poor decisions or try to weasel his way out, he realizes the error of his ways and turns himself over to the Federation.
• Big Ol' Eyebrows: Mr. Stemmons. That is all ye need know of eyebrows. Tribbles?
• Blood Knight: Korban is a classic Klingon and wants to get into the thick of battle at every opportunity.
• Bond One-Liner: "Assimilation is futile", after defeating a giant Borg in EF2.
• Bonus Stage: In EF2, one secret area leads to Super Mario World. Seriously.
• Bottomless Magazines: Elite Force II added reloading as a mechanic but enabling God Mode with the console gives you infinite ammo for your magazine which causes some amusing animation hiccups with the Sniper Rifle and Secondary Fire of the Rad-X cannon that are meant to begin their reload animations immediately after the firing animation.
• Call-Back: One of the missions in the sequel is set in the very same starbase, K7, that "The Trouble With Tribbles" took place on... although it's a century later, under alien control and looks nothing like it did back then.
• Continuity Nod: The first level of Elite Force II takes place during the last scenes of "Endgame", during Voyager's trip through the transwarp tunnel back to Earth.
• Convection, Schmonvection: In EF2, Munro can stand right next to lava and hop from rock to rock without injury. Munro's hazard suit has healing nanites, but this would only give him a good Healing Factor, not outright prevent damage (and they only do their work when using a health station, anyway). Even outright touching lava doesn't do all that much damage. However, the tutorial from the first game explains the health system as automatically draining in response to the power supply treating injuries in coordination with the on-board personal shield buffering the damage received. It would have fit very well to have some kind of slow health drain in response to the heat damage if your shields were down (presumably the personal shield would be enough to block extreme heat.)
• Crate Expectations: The second game features a secret area with a Boss Monster. Made of crates.
• Cutscene Incompetence:
  • Munro, ust after battling several Leviathans, lets himself get captured by a couple Idryll. This could actually be justified as they said they were taking him directly to Krindo. Hazard Team or no, Munro was still part of Starfleet and he realized this was an opportunity to negotiate with Krindo rather than unnecessarily kill more Idryll to reach him.
  • Earlier in the game, the Enterprise-E is crippled by just a few Idryll pulse cannon blasts. Granted, her shields were down to initially beam the Hazard Team down but the Sovereign class was designed as an anti-Borg cruiser and the U.S.S. Sovereign by comparison could have holes punched through her hull and keep on fighting.
• Cutting Off the Branches:
  • In EF1, protagonist Alex Munro can be male or female at the player's discretion; EF2 only has the male version.
  • The sequel avoids the question whether Foster survived by not showing or mentioning him at all.
• Damage Over Time: The Romulan Rad-X cannon fires bursts of intense theta radiation which either saturates the impact point or clings to a victim if they are hit directly.
• Evil Is Not a Toy:
  • The Idryll keep trying to reactivate the Exomorphs because they believe they're something that left behind from their glory days as a starspanning empire. The Exomorphs are what actually destroyed their former empire.
  • The Romulans actually do somewhat better in that regard. The Exomorphs don't go out of control until you blow up all their equipment and kill the Romulan Commander in charge.
• First Girl Wins: Can either be played straight or averted in the sequel depending on whether or not Alex chooses to romance long-time teammate Telsia, or the new stripperiffic Kleeya.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: A minor one occurs in the second game when the Hazard Team is disbanded and Munro's reassigned to small squad tactics. During a Romulan sneak attack on a Klingon Starbase (actually a simulated training session Munro is using for Korban), you still have your HUD, personal shield and that your hands when holding weapons show you having the sleeves of the hazard suit.
• Holodeck Malfunction: A small side-story in one of the mid-mission conversations in Elite Force II involves a crewman aboard the Enterprise-E obsessed with the Man Eating Plantlife of Andoria, it gets to the point that she got injured due to deliberately overriding the safety of the Holodeck by running the simulation in diagnostics mode (think like the Holodeck equivalent of Safe Mode or Developer Mode).
• Kicked Upstairs: For his role in getting Voyager back to the Alpha Quadrant, Munro is promoted and transferred to a teaching position at Starfleet Academy. Fortunately Captain Picard shows up and offers him a spot on the Enterprise.
• Lampshade Hanging: In the Elite Force II mission "Derelict":
  Franklin: Why does your team leader go off on scouting missions? Isn't he too valuable to risk?
  Chell: Don't ask.
• Last-Second Ending Choice: Averted with the 2 romance options in Elite Force II. Depending on how heavily you favor one of the love interests over the other in dialogue choices, you can lock-in which ending you'll get as early as halfway through the game. Even if you deliberately split your choices between the two of them equally, you'll still lock in which ending you get a good several levels before the end of the game.
• Lethal Lava Land: The last area of EF2 features copious amounts of lava.
• Lost World: The Idryll biogenetic factory, which turns out to be the source of the killer Exomorphs, in Elite Force II.
• Ms. Fanservice: The second game had Kleeya◊, a gorgeous alien scientist in a skimpy blue bikini. Given her design pays homage to alien babes romanced by Kirk in the original series, and she is also available as a Love Interest for Munro, this trope isn't surprising.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Despite being a Smug Snake terrorist, Krindo suffers a complete breakdown when he accidentally gets his father killed.
• Non-Standard Game Over: There are two in Elite Force II, one when you're captured by Krindo and agree to the hostage exchange, and another with Omag if you agree to his bribe to help him escape.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: Mr. Stemmons, the guy with the Big Ol' Eyebrows who disbands Hazard Team despite their results simply because they don't fit Starfleet regulations then any genuine good reason. After informed of this, Picard tells Stemmons, essentially, to kiss off.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Munro points one out to Tuvok in Elite Force II, with the former still trapped aboard the Sphere while being told Voyager will not leave until he's aboard. Alex even outright says "That's not logical!" to Tuvok of all people (of course, it could've been Janeway insisting on not leaving until Munro was aboard, not Tuvok).
• The Only One: Lampshaded in Elite Force II: "Why are you always running off alone?"
• Reasonable Authority Figure: At the end of Elite Force II the Romulan D'deridex Captain escorts the Enterprise out of the Neutral Zone and no one makes any issue of Starfleet violating it due to Extenuating circumstances.
• Pre-Final Boss: You fight Romulan Commander Suldok who's in a control room for the machinery that controls and produces the Exomorphs. Once you blow him to kingdom come, his last act is to release the Archeopendra, which declares its intent to wipe out all other lifeforms.
• Putting the Band Back Together: In EF2.
• Puzzle Boss: The Advanced Borg Drone's defenses can be disabled by hacking the shielded pillars in the room then destroying the distribution nodes on each pillar. Or you can ignore all that and just shoot it normally until it dies, though that will take longer.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: The Klingon commander Lurok puts up a pretty decent fight against you even after you get him out of his attack pod, wielding a gatling laser.
• Rubber-Forehead Aliens: The Idryll in EF2 are basically (hot) humans with luminous eyes, four fingers and oddly shaped ears.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: You can scan every character in the game with the tricorder, which gives you several basic statistics including height and weight. Some of the height and weight values given for characters seem quite strange. For example, Lurok the Klingon commander is supposedly 5 feet tall and weights 400 pounds according to the tricorder, and many of the Romulan soldiers read as being 5'4" and 100 pounds.
• Smug Snake: Krindo is an Obviously Evil Idryll scientist that is clearly meddling with forces beyond his comprehension.
• Stripperific: Kleeya, and to a lesser extent all Idryll females.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Korban in Elite Force II is an obvious stand-in for Worf. He was voiced by Tony Todd, who played Worf's brother, Kurn, on TNG. However, this is mostly just superficial. Korban was raised as a Klingon (as opposed to Worf's adoptive parents who were quite human), so he plays out more like a Klingon plucked from the Empire and placed in a Starfleet uniform than Worf.
• Take That!: Stimmons, the stuffy Starfleet bureaucrat from the sequel, is practically a middle finger towards Babylon 5, as he looks almost identical to a character from that show (Londo Mollari) and is written to be both idiotic and unlikeable. He only seems to be there so Picard can tell him to shut up at one point.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: When Reginald Barclay shows up in Elite Force II, he is not the designated Butt-Monkey he usually is. In fact while everyone is running around Engineering trying to save the Enterprise, he gets a dramatic camera pan right before he starts to save the day.
• Time Stands Still: The Idryll Staff's Secondary Fire in Elite Force II releases a chronometric distortion that freezes all enemies surrounding the user.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • Chell is still something of a coward, but whines a lot less and shows some real spine. When he suggests going over Stimmons' head and getting him fired for disbanding the Hazard Team, Chang remarks that he "was never this bloodthirsty fighting the Borg!"
  • Reginald Barclay serves as the heroic engineer that saves the Enterprise in its time of need.
• Trick Bomb: The Attrexian Arc Launcher can fire a grenade that saturates the area with charged ion gas, shooting it causes it to discharge and deal damage to nearby targets.
• Turned Against Their Masters: The Exomorphs in Elite Force II. First they turned against their creators, the ancient Idryll empire. Then the modern Idryll who reactivated them, and then they turn on a faction of rogue Romulans.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The plot of Elite Force II pretty much cribs the plot of Star Trek: Hidden Evil (a Resident Evil-style action-adventure game that had been released a couple years before), with the Enterprise investigating what turns out to be Romulans taking control of an ancient race of genetically engineered bio-weapons and wrecking havoc. The major difference is the addition of an Exodus-type subplot involving another alien race, and a whole lot more shooting.
  • The entire Ferengi subplot midway through the second game is lifted from the same in the TNG episode "Unification", down to it being the same Ferengi arms dealer being interrogated.
• Wretched Hive:
  • For bonus points, the bar in the second game has a Shout-Out to Star Wars: in one of the booths you can find some people re-creating the scene from A New Hope where Luke and Obi-Wan hire Han Solo. The dialog is identical, except for swapping out Wars' Techno Babble with Trek's Techno Babble.
  • For even more bonus points, the Ferengi arms dealer you're after is actually a Call-Back to TNG, where Riker ends up going into another Wretched Hive to interrogate the very same Ferengi arms dealer in order to reveal... a Romulan plot.
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: The Idryll, much to many player's surprise, attack the Enterprise.

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