We were hoping that the "black ops" section of Star Fleet would explore things like nefarious Federation torture chambers, secret sex clubs and state-sponsored assassinations on opposing Admirals. No such luck. It seems that the undocumented actions of Star Fleet's elite corps of secret officers isn't much more trashy than most episodes. But the story about biological warfare and Federation traitors is interesting and compelling nonetheless.

The gameplay has the same feeling as the story: It's fun and familiar but hardly new or daring. Players begin every mission at the loadout screen, where they get to select which member of the away team is best suited for the mission. The action begins by beaming into a dangerous situation with a series of primary and secondary objectives. New objectives will occasionally pop up during a mission, but everything is kept clear with a simple tap of the objectives button. Moving the away team through the 2D worlds is simple and straightforward. Officers can be selected by clicking on the characters, their portraits or their corresponding numbers on the keyboard. Hitting the A button will select all characters, and selecting their run speed is as simple as tapping the X button.

By the end of the first mission, we were moving characters around with ease -- which, ironically, led to a slightly annoying problem. Because hotkeys make it easy to control the game, we would have liked to have the option of turning off the left and lower menu bars so more of the game world was onscreen at one time. This, unfortunately, is not an option, although it is possible to zoom in and out slightly to get nearly the same effect -- but it is not possible to rotate the camera because of the fixed, 2D isometric perspective.

A useful mini-map, complete with blinking blue objective points, makes getting through the world fast and easy (there are only two difficulty settings, "normal" and "easy.") The objectives throughout the 18 missions are always fixed, so the real strategy and variety comes in how gamers choose to complete the objective. Stealth play is possible thanks to personal cloaking devices, silent Vulcan nerve pinches and sniper fire. Or demolition experts can be used to chuck grenades and then blast the survivors. The key comes in choosing the right collection of crewmembers at the loadout screen.

The emphasis, though, is really on slow, deliberate gameplay. Reflexive has taken the familiar vision cones of other squad-based games and added the natural extension to sound. Players can toggle on or off the sound waves that emanate from the team members, giving them some idea of how much of a ruckus they are making. It's a great idea -- we didn't employ it a lot, but it was vital when we needed it.

The only major problem with Away Team is that the officers are simple mannequins when not directly under a player's control. When they are attacked they simply cry out with a ridiculously understated "I am hit," or "I'm under attack." Speaking from personal experience, we have a tendency to scream profanities and flail around hysterically whenever we are attacked. Unfortunately, these overly stalwart officers would simply take it until we told them to return fire. This was a problem whenever we had split the party up across the map to accomplish separate goals simultaneously. We would have preferred to have some option to set the ferocity of reaction, but there isn't any. This is particularly a problem given that the death of any member of the away team is a fail state in almost all of the levels.

This sort of handholding extends sometimes to path finding. In some missions there are camera or security towers to be avoided, and clicking too far in front of the team will result in some of these crack officers running right through the vision field of the cameras, instead of running around them. We also had a few system lockups on two different systems, one with a GeForce 2, the other with a Voodoo3. Fortunately, gamers can save anywhere with an unlimited amount of save slots.

PC gamers who didn't enjoy Commandos will probably not get into the Away Team-style squad play. The missions usually only take two or three tries to get them right, and the whole thing can be over rather quickly. There is very limited multiplayer support in the form of cooperative two-player games over a LAN only. But we enjoyed the first-rate voice acting, including some Next Generation favorites -- and who doesn't love mind melding some guard and walking him into a land mine? It won't win any awards for graphics or AI, but Away Team is a solid and fun experience.