Star Trek

"We're not trying to make a Trek game."

That's how director Steve Sinclair begins his E3 presentation of, well, his new Trek game. The ebullient Canadian is working at Ontario's Digital Extremes (currently also making The Darkness II) on a game tie-in for the next Star Trek movie from J J Abrams' Bad Robot production company, due in 2012.

What Sinclair means is that his studio is taking the same approach Bad Robot did. Abrams decided his 2009 reboot should be an "amazing sci-fi movie" before it was a Trek film, and he emphasised action and spectacle at the expense of the sober tone of classic Trek. Not all Star Trek fans appreciated it - but you couldn't deny the film's rambunctious entertainment value.

Digital Extremes' game represents a similarly unashamed lunge for your fun jugular, and it doesn't care if students of Federation politics and the Klingon tongue disapprove. It's a breakneck co-op shooter starring Kirk and Spock which hustles the chalk-and-cheese friends from one death-defying scrape to the next blazing laser-gun battle. The Next Generation this is not.

It's set in between the two films and pursues its own storyline, the reasoning being that the most successful film franchise spin-offs in recent years - The Chronicles of Riddick springs to mind - have chosen to work around rather than translate their source material, and spin stories more suited to games. The writers of the first movie, Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci, are working with God of War writer Marianne Krawczyk on the script.

Sinclair - whose irrepressible blow-by-blow commentary on the on-screen action added so much excitement to the demo it should probably be bottled and added to the disc - describes the game's genre as "bro-op". That might induce a wince but his point is the team wants to evoke the contrasting characters of Kirk and Spock, as well as the camaraderie of a buddy movie. And so the game has been designed with "asymmetrical" co-op in mind.

It's not just about banter (although there will be plenty of that, judging by the way Sinclair bemoans the predominance of "severe, emo bulls**t games"). Kirk and Spock will have different tools at their disposal. They will have contrasting but complimentary tactics and will be thrown into situations where they have different roles to perform.

With that in mind, although Star Trek supports drop in, drop out online co-op, it won't be possible to switch characters in the middle of one play-through; you'll have to unlock chapters sequentially for each. Digital Extremes is obviously hoping you'll enjoy the ride so much you'll want to run it a second time from a different perspective.

The demo begins with Kirk and Spock returning from a mission aboard a shuttle to find the Enterprise trapped in a web of energy beams of alien origin. Unable to dock, they sieze LSPUs - life support propulsion units, rocket packs like the scuba divers' gadgets in Bond movie Thunderball - and simply jump into space, roaring through the vacuum and dodging mines in a vertiginous chase sequence.

Spock lands with neat precision while Kirk barrels messily into a stack of crates. They take of their helmets and reveal good likenesses of Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto. Talks to get these actors involved to voice their film parts is "ongoing", apparently.

It's a glossy-looking game, this, rendered in Digital Extremes' proprietary engine and, although pre-alpha, already showing the benefit of a year and half of well-funded development. The film's signature cool yet colourful look has translated perfectly, right down to the excessive application of lens flare.