Star Trek: Encounters is one of the biggest undertakings a Star Trek title has attempted so far. Spanning all five series, this ship-to-ship combat game is just what the Trekkie-gamer is looking for.

Graphically, Encounters is dead on, at least as far as the ship and station models are concerned. All of the Enterprises featured in the series from the NX-01 all the way to the NCC-1701-E come through in spectacular detail and would make any Trekkie cry. Even Jupiter Station, DS9 and other frequented space stations appear as they did in the series.

The game's audible aspects aren't as top notch as the graphics, but still come off pretty well. The only voicework in the game is William Shatner as the narrator/guide and the sound effects do a good job of mimicking the phaser or torpedo sounds from the shows.

Star Trek: Encounters is broken up into the five series' and has you go through them in chronological order (or at least as chronological as Star Trek can be). You start off with Enterprise, then The Original Series, then TNG, DS9 and Voyager. Each series has three or four campaigns that take you through some of the major conflicts of that show. Enterprise has you defending Earth against the Xindi, while in other series', you will have to face off against the Romulans, Klingons and Dominion, and of course what Trek game would be complete without the Borg?

The game forces you to go through each series in order instead of allowing you to start some missions in the Enterprise era and jump ahead to Voyager. I can understand forcing you to complete the missions within an era in order, but I found it a bit annoying that I couldn't skip around between the stories as I pleased, at least at first. In the end, I went along with it because the further you progress in the game, the more powerful technology and weapons you gain, thus working like a form of leveling up across missions.

There are two gameplay modes in Encounters: Skirmish and Episode. Episode is the story mode talked about above. This is where you will relive many of the major events from the Star Trek universe. And, as you encounter new races and fleets, those ships will be unlocked in the Skirmish mode.

Skirmish consists of three types of short battles. Head-to-Head is your standard Deathmatch style game where two ships plow away at each other until the frag-limit is reached or the time runs out. Battlefest is a little more interesting (at least in my opinion). Here, you and your opponent choose a race/empire. Three ships of the chosen style are picked and the two of you go at it. You each start off as the lesser of the three ships (a Xindi fighter or the NX-01, for example) and each time a ship is destroyed, the next larger one is called in. Whoever runs out of ships first loses. You start off only being able to choose between the Federation (with the NX-01, NCC-1701's A and D) and the Xindi, but as you progress, other races will become available and the Battlefest section will become a bit more interesting.

Onslaught acts as a survival mode and allows one or two players (co-op) to be thrown into a never-ending battle where wave after wave of enemies come at you. The longer you live and the quicker you take out enemies, the more points you earn.

Star Trek: Encounters is touted as an arcade space-combat game, but I have to disagree with that. The amount of control you have available to you, and the amount of control you need to effectively utilize in order to get past most missions makes this anything but arcade style. If anything, Encounters is more of a Star Trek simulator because you have to not only manage your weapons, but also the amount of energy that goes to your four major components (more on that later) and if you balance your power wrong, you will be torn to shreds. I would agree with the arcade setting more if there was some sort of automatic energy balancing system in place that meant I just had to worry about shooting the other guy, but that is not the case.

Star Trek: Encounters gives you a lot of control over your ship. Unfortunately, I haven't ever really been big on micro-management, but I can't see a way out of it if you want a realistic Trek game. Using the D-Pad, you can shift energy from shields to weapons and from sensors to engines. As you would expect, the higher amount of energy allocated to a specific area of your ship, the better it will behave. More energy to the shields means you won't take as much damage, but that is also energy taken away from the weapons. Powering up the engines might make you move faster, but your scanners will be a little less accurate when trying to take out your opponent's engines (and not the whole ship).

The other mechanic that is worth mentioning is how the game handles 3D space. Basically, each area is broken up into three planes. Your ship stays in the center slice unless you hold down L1 or L2 which raises and lowers your ship respectively. This seems to be a little hard to manage at first, but after the first mission or so, you should have a good handle on it. When the objects around you are on a different plane than you are, a blue line comes from its center giving you a better judge of depth.

As good as Encounters is, it is very much for Trekkies, and very few others will even give it a cursory glance. Though you don't need an extensive knowledge of the series to fly your ship about and blow up enemies, understanding why you need to have the control in your ship's energy flow or which weapons are stronger than others does help. Put simply, Trekkies should pick this game up -- otherwise, proceed only if you like games of this type in general.