To me it seems like games are just one level down from an acceptable compromise between safe bets and innovation - Elite Force 2 -is- much better than Unreal 2, from the demos, but it's just the arcadey, endless-waves-of-aliens, energy-weapons-blazing type of thing you'd expect from Unreal 2. A Star Trek game should be something different, not just for the sake of originality, but for the sake of the license - I don't remember seeing many shotguns and machineguns in Star Trek, but because it's an FPS they had to put them in, or their thinly disguised energy equivalents.

I would have loved to have seen a game where you play an actual Starfleet officer like in everything else Star Trek, not some armoured, tooled-up action game version of one. You could choose science, medical, security, engineering or command, and only security would get a weapon other than a phaser, and that would just be the phase-rifles. Your tricorders would be different - you could heal people and yourself with a medical tricorder, analyse your surroundings better with a science one, etc. You'd have to investigate places and decide what to do, rather than just hold down fire when the aliens appear from nowhere. The view modes were a nice idea, but don't make much sense (what does the tricorder do, replace your eyes?), and in the demo are only used to highlight the painfully obvious, the trick that's was old by the end of Duke Nukem 3D - there's a crack in that, blow it up!

Unreal 2 should have been like this - the absurd energy shotgun - however un-Star Trek - is satisfying to use, and the enemies react well to being blown up, flying back or exploding. Sadly Unreal 2 was a whole level less original, and Elite Force 2 has little to do with Star Trek - none of the aliens, completely different weapons, showers-of-gore gameplay, they didn't even let you have a normal Starfleet uniform. It's not a bad game, just like the first one wasn't, but it's sad to see a license with so much potential - potential specifically suited to a first person game - thrown away and replaced with generic arcade mediocrity that completely ignores it.

PS. I think the plot of Elite Force 2 is going to explain the apparent presence of Picard, and the fact that the shuttle is Enterprise, but in general, the first and the second game are primarily set on Voyager - the full title is Star Trek: Voyager: Elite Force 2.