"Let me go, captain, I don't want to be in this game any more." Worse still, any semblance of life is immediately lost as soon as they move or talk. The animation in this game is shockingly primitive; moving a character from a standing start will result in them sliding along the floor in a standing position for several feet before the jerky running animation kicks in, for example. In the Xbox 360 version, the textures are nothing short of grotesque. While clothing textures on the main characters are passable during gameplay, when they are only half the screen high, during cutcsenes when the camera moves in closer, the textures on their clothing look like mosaics, the pixels are so huge. It's unforgivably ugly. Exploring the revamped Enterprise from the new movies should be great fun, but all I could see was how lifeless it all is. Nameless crewmates stand around with rigid postures, talking to each other moving only their mouths, looking for all the world like stiff animatronic Madame Tussaud's dummies. The game box boasts that you can "interact with the crew of the Enterprise!" but as far as I have found so far, this means walking up to Scotty as he stands, rigid and motionless in the engineering bay, and pressing a button to trigger him to say one line of dialogue. If you press the button again, he will repeat the same line. Frankly, this kind of game world is not even remotely good enough for a modern audience. It might have been tolerable a decade ago, but even then we had Black Mesa security guards following Gordon Freeman and chatting amongst themselves in Half-Life. The Enterprise should be a bustling hive of activity, but instead it seems to be inhabited by botox injection abusers whose feet have been glued to the floor.

One of the more entertaining bugs lets you peek inside Spock and Kirk's heads. Out on a mission, things are not much better. The core of the game is over-the-shoulder cover-based shooting, using a variety of incredibly bland and samey weapons. There's a sniper, a shotgun, an assault rifle, and a few other in-between weapons, but none of them feel even remotely fun to use. Enemy AI is atrocious. Your main opponent in this game is the Gorn, redesigned from the rubber-headed man in a suit from the original TV series to, basically, velociraptors with guns. Have you ever seen a velociraptor try to take cover behind a crate during a firefight? Their tails stick out, making an easy target for you to shoot at. The story is about as pedestrian as a science fiction plot can be. Some scientists made a MacGuffin. Some aliens stole the MacGuffin. You have to go and retrieve the MacGuffin. You might think I am exaggerating, but the storyline really is that shallow. Captain Kirk even gets a love interest, in the form of a comically "sexy" female Vulcan scientist. Considering Vulcans are supposed to be emotionless and unattached to trivial material matters, one wonders why she has gigantic glossy lips, heavy eye makeup, and a trendy asymmetrical hairstyle. Even the boots on her space suit have high heels.

Add all of this together and you should at least have a great big mess of a game that is at least entertaining from a rubbernecking-at-a-car-wreck perspective. Somehow, though, it just ends up dull. There is absolutely no drama, no emotional drive to push the story along or motivate the characters, no sense of urgency. The game feels pedestrian in every sense of the word. I managed to convince my boyfriend to sit down and play some co-operative split-screen with me, hoping that the human factor would lend a bit of life to the proceedings. On the contrary, we just got twice as bored. After a couple of hours, he asked, "Why are we even doing this? What's the point of it all?" That's right, this game is so boring that it triggered a metaphysical dilemma in my boyfriend. Thanks, Star Trek. So, is there anything good about this game? Not much, but a few things do come to mind. The voice performances are pretty good, no thanks to the dire script. Zoe Saldana sounds like she was half asleep while recording Uhura's lines, but Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto are quite good as Kirk and Spock, and Simon Pegg is clearly having a ball as Scotty. There are also a few small, sparkling pieces of nifty design, obscured by layers of crap like gold flakes in a silty riverbed. During one early level, the artificial gravity in a space station points in toward the centre of the structure, so there are several curved pathways that twist around in 3D. It feels pleasantly spacey, and twisted gravity like that is too rare in modern games.

Some of the cinematic moments are also decent, with one good early example being the first appearance of the reptilian Gorn. As Spock is trying to force open a hatch in the ceiling, it appears to give way, only to reveal that it has been lifted by a monstrous reptilian creature that then grabs Spock and throws him across the room. It's a fun reveal, spoiled slightly by the fact that the Gorn's skin texture is horribly low-res and blurry. Star Trek has more than the average number of bugs - scripted sequences that break, AI-controlled characters who sprint through walls, and climbing controls that have your character leaping to their deaths as often as they actually jump to the handhold above them. Even so, bugs can be fixed. What cannot be fixed is fundamentally lazy design, cheap and nasty production values, and a total lack of interesting ideas. Playing Star Trek, you can feel the developer trying to mimic better games - there's some Halo here, some Gears of War there, and some Uncharted over here - but the result is just meaningless parroting. Worse still, it's dull, which to my mind is the ultimate crime a game can commit. I will gladly suffer through a flawed game if it has interesting ideas at its heart, but Star Trek has no ideas at all. It's an insipid paint-by-numbers knock-off that took three years to make but feels like it was churned out in six months. Everybody involved in creating this monstrosity should feel deeply ashamed of themselves. - James "DexX" Dominguez

DexX is on Twitter: @jamesjdominguez

