Star Trek

Star Trek (often referred to officially as Star Trek: The Video Game) is a 2013 third-person cooperative action-adventure shooter developed by Digital Extremes and published by Namco Bandai. Released for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC, it was intended to be a massive AAA multimedia event bridging the gap between J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek film reboot and its 2013 sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness. Instead, it became one of the most notoriously broken, critically panned movie tie-in games in the history of the medium.

Core Concept and The Kelvin Timeline

The game is set in the cinematic “Kelvin Timeline” and features the actual voices and likenesses of the film’s cast, including Chris Pine (Kirk) and Zachary Quinto (Spock).

The narrative acts as a direct prequel to Into Darkness. It follows Kirk and Spock as they attempt to stop a reimagined version of the classic Star Trek villains, the Gorn (who were redesigned from slow, rubber-suited lizards into fast, aggressive, raptor-like aliens). The Gorn have stolen a dangerous terraforming device called the Helios Machine from the New Vulcan colony, and it is up to the Enterprise crew to get it back.

Gameplay and Features

The developers attempted to create an asymmetric, narrative-driven co-op experience heavily inspired by Gears of War and Mass Effect, but the execution completely missed the mark:

• Asymmetric “Bro-Op”: The entire game was built around two-player cooperative play.
  • Captain Kirk played like a standard third-person shooter protagonist, equipped with phasers that could be used for heavy run-and-gun combat.
  • Commander Spock was supposed to be the stealthy tactician, equipped with a quieter Vulcan repeater and the ability to perform Vulcan nerve pinches and mind-melds.
• The Tricorder Grind: When you weren’t shooting Gorn from behind chest-high walls, the game forced you to constantly pull out your Tricorder to slowly scan doors, environmental hazards, and dead bodies to earn XP for weapon upgrades. It brought the game’s pacing to an absolute crawl.
• Mini-Game Overload: To simulate the feeling of being on a starship, the game was padded with highly repetitive, tedious hacking mini-games and an incredibly clunky space-combat sequence where the Enterprise shot at Gorn ships.

The Bugs and The Backlash

Star Trek is legendary for being fundamentally, hilariously broken at launch. Rushed to hit the theatrical release date of the movie, the game was shipped in an abysmal state.

The internet was immediately flooded with compilation videos of the game’s catastrophic glitches. Enemies would frequently T-pose, clip through the floor, or get stuck in walls. The AI for your AI partner (if you played solo) was completely brain-dead; Spock would regularly run directly into enemy fire, block your shots, or float completely off the ground during cutscenes. The cover system rarely worked, and character animations were notoriously stiff and unfinished.

The J.J. Abrams Feud and Legacy

The critical reception was so vicious that it actually sparked a feud in Hollywood. Director J.J. Abrams publicly disowned the game shortly after its release. He stated that the game was a major disappointment, that his film team dropped out of the game’s development process due to its low quality, and he even controversially claimed that the terrible reviews of the video game actively hurt the box office performance of Star Trek Into Darkness.

In 2014, quietly and without warning, the game was permanently delisted from all digital storefronts, making it effectively lost media unless you track down a physical disc.

Interestingly, the developer, Digital Extremes, took the lessons learned from this disastrous production and immediately pivoted to their own passion project—a free-to-play sci-fi shooter called Warframe, which went on to become one of the most successful and beloved live-service games of the decade.

Quick Note

Star Trek (2013) is a spectacular, textbook example of the “movie tie-in curse.”

In short: Despite having the official cast and a decent premise, it was a rushed, glitch-ridden, derivative cover-shooter that entirely failed to capture the spirit of exploration that defines Star Trek, opting instead to make Kirk and Spock aggressively shoot space lizards behind waist-high walls.