Star Trek Deep Space 9: The Fallen

Pros • Great musical score adds tension and sets the mood • Excellent graphics and world environments • Fluid character movement • Multi-character system = 3 games in 1 • The tricorder rocks! • Cool plot (if you’re into DS9)	Cons • Some puzzles too simple • Weapon selection could use a little boost • Annoyingly repetitive communications with NPCs
Bottom Line Satisfy your desire to star in an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine by playing The Fallen, an action/adventure filled series of missions where you can take the role of either Captain Sisko, Lieutenant Commander Worf, or Major Kira. Following hot on the heels of the success of Voyager: Elite Force, Simon & Schuster’s The Fallen hopes to continue the current trend of decent Trek games. At first glance this might seem like a knockoff of Elite Force in both look and feel except that it’s in the DS9 setting. However, playing The Fallen will actually reveal some hidden and surprising differences and strengths. What really stands out is the way the story unfolds as played from different character’s perspectives. It’s just like being in an episode, and to me that’s the game’s best feature. The plot itself concerns the Pah-wraiths, those nasty wormhole aliens that hate the Prophets of Bajor, and includes everything from the Defiant to the Jem-Hadar, and those sneaky spoon-heads, the Cardassians.

Set somewhere during the beginnings of the sixth season and the outbreak of the Dominion War, DS9: The Fallen scores right away by cashing in on the era of the show that is most loved by its fans. Though you won’t get to command starships in battle (you’ll have to wait until Dominion Wars is out,) you will become embroiled in the religious squabbles of Bajor and get to kill your fair share of aliens for good measure. As the story unfolds, you will attempt to secure the three lost orbs of the Pah-Wraiths while also trying to figure out what exactly it was that Cardassian scientists were attempting to do with them six years earlier. Of course, not all is as it seems and the plot contains a few not altogether unexpected twists.

Where The Fallen truly shines is in the use of its multi-character system. When you start the game, you can choose to play as Sisko, Worf, or Kira (it would have rocked to play as Odo but I guess a shapeshifting character was not something the programmers wanted to tackle… sigh.) As Sisko or Worf, the games starts aboard the Defiant, with the ship en route to a distress call sent by a Bajoran science vessel. When the Defiant arrives and wounded are detected aboard the other vessel, Sisko decides to beam over so that he can place transporter enhancers on the Bajoran crewmembers. In Sisko’s role, you get to explore the damaged vessel and face off against a new mechanical race called the Grigari. They come in two shapes, and the small flying drone types are easily dispatched. The larger kind, however, have body shielding, much like the Borg. Each of these shields runs on its own modulation frequency and your phaser constantly needs to be properly set to penetrate each individual Grigari’s shields. How is this accomplished? Enter the trusty tricorder, which allows you to scan your surroundings in full 3D mode. Not only will it tell you where Bajoran survivors might be found or what the contents of a given crate are, it will also scan for enemy signatures and determine their shield frequency. Once this is done, a quick adjustment (manual or auto, your option) and buh-bye Grigari.

If you are playing as Worf, after Sisko departs and leaves you in command of the Defiant, a Grigari ship appears and disables your vessel. Grigari soon begin to board the Defiant and it’s up to everyone’s favourite Klingon to do some house-cleaning. For the sake of diversity, Worf does not have a hand phaser so in order to deal with those shielded Grigari bastards he must rely on his sharp Bat’leth or lead them to any of a number of ruptured EPS conduits and fry them in a plasma discharge. You must restore power to the Defiant and clear the decks of intruders while Sisko continues his rescue mission.

If you begin play as Kira, you will be far away on one of Bajor’s moons, fending off an attack of Bajoran fundamentalist terrorists who are after Obadanak, the new Prylar of the Pah-wraith Cult. Like a TV episode that follows the parallel actions of the characters, you can play the game from three different perspectives and follow separate paths to the same ultimate objective. What a great concept, and it is well executed too.

The Fallen also looks and feels great. Use of the Unreal engine brings alien worlds and starship interiors to glorious life in stunning detail and colour. The game uses a third person perspective that is very similar to Heretic 2 and Rune, and the highly touted custom-designed inverse kinematics and bones animation system that promises fluid and realistic movements certainly exceeded my expectations. I never felt more confident leaping to grasp a cliff edge or climbing up precarious ladders. Add a good musical score that sets the perfect mood as you explore the crashed derelict hull of the USS Ulysses on the surface of S-R III or escape from the Dominion prison camp on Ardunia and things couldn’t be better. Or could they?

Unfortunately, your choice of weaponry leaves a little something to be desired. Aside from your fists and phaser, there’s also a phaser rifle with a great sniper scope, and Worf’s Bat’leth. After that comes the Cardassian disruptor rifle, the Jem’Hadar’s polaron rifle, a grenade launcher, gravitic mines, the shock blade, plasma thrower, and EM pulse cannon. Though the names sound impressive, the weapons rarely are, and even with dual firing modes they still seem to lack the punch that the guns in Elite Force had for example. On the issue of puzzles, The Fallen also falls into the age-old trap “of find the red pass-card to open the red door” syndrome. Fortunately, the object of your searching is invariably very close by and the tricorder can be an invaluable asset in locating that elusive command card. Lastly, though the game makes good use of the Starfleet communicator to get advice and instructions from the rest of the crew, it gets annoying when they keep contacting you to repeat the same advice over and over again. I only need to be told that I need a pass card to open a card-reader door once, thank you very much! Thankfully you can chose not to answer, hehehe.

Kudos to Simon & Schuster for the first ever successful Deep Space Nine game (in my humble opinion) to hit store shelves. It’s a shame they could not get Avery Brooks and Colm Meaney to do the voiceovers for Sisko and O’Brien respectively. Makes you wonder if those guys were too busy or too self-important to do a computer game. Maybe they were off partying with Jeri Ryan, as her Seven-of-Nine voice was also conspicuously absent from Elite Force. Ah well, who knows with these Hollywood types. The rest of the cast does a passable job with the voice acting and the guy that did Sisko’s voice pulls it off quite well. Give DS9: The Fallen a spin, you won’t be disappointed.

Rafael Canoa

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