- Original Release: TBC
- Developer: Gamexcite
- Publisher: Daedalic Entertainment
- Platform: PC, Xbox Series, PS5, Switch
- Version Played: PC Demo
Out of nowhere, a new Star Trek game was announced. It’s based on Voyager and lets you play through their journey home. Definitely an ambitious project for a developer Gamexcite, especially based on their previous work. Still, it promises to let you command Voyager and figure out your own way home. So far, I’ve only played the demo, but you can tell a lot about it from it.
The first thing that stands out is the presentation. The models and textures are quite poor, but being an Unreal 5 game, the developers have added a ton of effects that make the game run quite badly on most systems – which is crazy as the overall look isn’t too different to Star Trek Timelines, a 2016 mobile game. There are subtitles introducing Vogager’s mission, but no voice acting, before a slideshow whisks the crew away to the Delta Quadrant. Throughout the game you’ll get some bridge scenes with text-based dialogue while looking at knock-off versions of the cast of the show, and it rarely feels like dialogue the characters would actually say.
A good chunk of the game is resource management. Gather resources, build new rooms, unlock the ability to get more resources. With the very muted sounds and boring music, it’s easy to grow tired of it before you’re half way though the demo. There’s a tech tree to unlock more stuff, but it’s just more resource gathering. Across the Unknown doesn’t do anything new or interesting with this side of things. The UI and menus are also a pain to navigate, and text is far too small (and I usually don’t mind tiny text). One worrying thing is that your resources drain very fast and it doesn’t look like there’s that much to improve things in the tech tree.
When it comes to missions…it gets even worse. You pick a few people to go on the away mission and get presented with a few hurdles. You pick a skill from a crewmember and a random number is added to the skill to potentially succeed. The system is ripped straight out of Star Trek Timelines, but toned down even more. In Timelines, it was about building stuff up to beat the final section and failing the final part would result in you losing the mission. In this… you win even if you fail everything. Your away team can become injured and if they’re all incapacitated, you get sent to a save from just before the away mission.
So, there’s no actually any meaningful choices to make in the away missions. Even if you lose, you still succeed. The only thing that changes is what resources you gained or lost. There are a few other choices in the game. You can choose to have Tom and Chakotay or Kin and B’Elanna to be sent from the Caretaker to Voyager, then have to rescue the other two. There’s some slight dialogue differences, but nothing meaningful. Before the final option, you get a taste of the combat.
Once again, this is a lot like the ship combat in Timelines. Select a tactic (attack or defend) and the game does all the fun parts of piloting the ship and shooting away from you. You just mash buttons to activate the abilities of up to three selected crew. Other than dying, your performance is irrelevant. While the Marquis ship Val Jean will probably be healthy at the end of the fight, it will blow up in a cutscene. I wasn’t expecting anything fancy with additional ships, but they could still function like more powerful shuttles.
At the end of the demo you get to choose to destroy the Caretaker Array or return home. The return home option is a very underwhelming final cutscene that’s essentially a “game over” screen. It ignores the massive reinforcement Kazon fleet that was a huge obstacle in the show and the characters act out of character (especially Chakotay). Still, it means I’ve technically completed the game and won’t need to subject myself to more when the full game is out.
Next: Star Trek Infection
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