A Gorn-based story that focuses on cooperation between Kirk and Spock

Jan 15, 2013 01:41 GMT  ·  By

What we know: Star Trek is a curious intellectual property: it spawned numerous television series, mostly beloved by fans and critics, and has been rebooted successfully in movie form, but has failed to deliver a significant video game in the last few years.

Developer Digital Extremes and publisher Namco Bandai want to change that with the simply named Star Trek, which allows players to take on the roles of Captain Kirk and First Officer Spock in their current incarnations as they explore the galaxy and meet alien races.

The game will allow for single-player sessions, but is best played by two gamers who coordinate their actions and take advantage of the particular abilities of the two protagonists, one focused on combat and the other on science and exploration.

The biggest problem at the moment is that the designated enemies for Star Trek are the Gorn, which are both peripheral to the universe and do not evoke strong feelings among the fan base despite their fierce appearance.

Star Trek will be available on the PC, the PlayStation 3 from Sony and the Xbox 360 on April 23 in the United States and on April 26 in Europe.

Why it matters: Star Trek might be the franchise’s last chance to make an impression in the video game space and the publisher is pulling all the stops to have an impact, with characters that are as close as possible to those of the new movie and voice work from Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto.

It remains to be seen whether players will be willing to look past the uninspired enemies and the apparently simple plot in order to see how Captain Kirk and Spock banter and shoot their way through an adventure.

The full Incoming 2013 series of articles can be read on Softpedia right here.