Entertainment
New Star Trek Release Is The Fix For Starfleet Academy Haters, Makes Trek’s Golden Age Even More Golden
By Joshua Tyler
| Published
In an era where Star Trek has become a televised disaster with embarrassing, franchise-destroying products like Starfleet Academy and Star Trek: Discovery, you wouldn’t expect to get any good new Star Trek video games. But somehow, that’s exactly what’s happening. Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown has just been released on most major gaming platforms, and it’s everything fans have been waiting for.
As much as Trekkies enjoy Star Trek: Voyager, it’s also always been viewed as something of a missed opportunity. A show about a ship stranded far from home is the perfect opportunity for complex survival-focused storytelling. Star Trek: Voyager had the kind of premise that could have made it Battlestar Galactica-level engrossing, as each week the ship struggled to find food and energy while dealing with a malfunctioning vessel and the other problems inherent in being lost, with nowhere to refuel.
Across The Unknown Improves The Television Show
Unfortunately, with a few exception episodes like “Year of Hell,” Voyager mostly ignored its own premise and acted like any other Star Trek show. Stories about the realities of being stranded were rare, and such problems were easily resolved with hand-waving.
Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown corrects that mistake with a game that lets you play through Voyager’s entire journey back to Earth, but from a survival perspective where you’re the one in charge of sorting out the difficult logistics, all the things the series glossed over, all the details of how to keep a ship flying when you’re lost and there’s no one to help.
Change Voyager’s Fate With Your Decisions
The game is structured like a space-faring version of the classic base-building sim Fallout Shelter. Instead of building and maintaining a bunker, you’re repairing and maintaining the USS Voyager as Captain Janeway tries to get her crew home.
Along the way, you help Janeway make critical decisions, with the ability to make totally different choices from the ones she makes on the show. My USS Voyager, for instance, currently has a Kazon tactical officer. And I could have kept Tuvix as part of my crew instead of splitting him back into Tuvok and Neelix, but screw that guy, I never liked him.
Better Ship Battles Than Any Modern Star Trek Show
The game’s graphics are well done. The map screen is beautiful, with the ability to seamlessly zoom in up close on ships and zoom out for a sector view. Cut scenes are rare but well executed when they surface. Battles are stunningly rendered, though don’t expect to do a lot of shooting yourself. Across the Unknown is an RPG, which means your role in both combat and away missions is mostly to make choices.
In space battles, you get to see those choices play out, with ships zooming around, firing torpedoes, and executing maneuvers you direct. On Away Missions, the results of your choices are reported back via text popups telling you the outcome of what you had each member of your landing party do.
Several Star Trek: Voyager actors lent their voices to the game. You’ll especially hear a lot from Tim Russ as Tuvok. Mostly, though, the game is about reading text and managing Voyager from a static side-view screen where you build, repair, and can zoom in and out on compartments.
That side-view screen is something of a wonder, though. Zoomed out, it’s just an MSD of Voyager. However, if you zoom in, you can see inside each room to watch crew members working, moving around, and living. It’s a detail they didn’t have to include; it has no impact on gameplay, but it does add to the game’s immersion and lets you feel like you’re really there, peering inside the ship as you decide whether to spend your resources on a warp core upgrade or on repairs to the aero shuttle.
Star Trek Sings When Freed From Alex Kurtzman’s Clutches
Across the Unknown works seamlessly and breathes new life into the seven seasons of Voyager you’ve already seen. It’s better, narratively, than anything Star Trek has produced since the cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise and it’s exactly what Trekkies need, right now, in Trek’s darkest moment.
There’s a reason it’s good, and it’s probably because current Star Trek boss Alex Kurtzman had absolutely nothing to do with it. Instead, the game was developed by German studio gameXcite and published by Daedalic Entertainment. They licensed the IP from Paramount and then went off to do their own thing.
It’s further proof that the problem with modern Star Trek isn’t Star Trek itself, but the people in charge of it. When freed from their clutches, Star Trek snaps back to form.
A Pathway To A Bright Future For Star Trek
If this works, and I hope it does, they’ve established a perfect model to use on other Star Trek shows. Imagine playing through Deep Space Nine’s Dominion War arc, with the ability to change the fate of the entire Alpha Quadrant, should you decide to make choices different from the ones made by Benjamin Sisko.
There’s infinite potential in what Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown has done here, but even if it’s just one off, be thankful it exists. The game’s a rare ray of light in Star Trek’s darkest of dark ages.
ACROSS THE UNKNOWN REVIEW SCORE