Star Trek Resurgence is an enjoyable game, and it’s sad it’s not available to buy any more, but on the other hand, having played it, it’s not that surprising it didn’t sell that well and the devs shut down.
I’ve also seen people online call it the best Star Trek story in the last decade, and while I’d agree, that’s more of a damning indictment of how terrible nu-trek is rather than a vote of confidence in the story of the game, which I found had a number of flaws. Still it was enjoyable to step back into the classic Star Trek period that the 90s shows inhabited and play a game in that style.
Before getting to that and the spoilers, there’s the rest of the game to cover first. Graphically I’d say it’s somewhat dated, looking like something from 2010, but to be honest I didn’t care, it gets the job done and has the classic Star Trek style. It in theory runs fine, I had no crashes and constant 120fps, however in many places the animations seem choppy, I think that’s because a lot of them are rendered at 30fps. In many places the animations were also just pretty glitchy as well. Sound wise, the sound effects are for the most part very Star Trek and fitting, and the voice acting is excellent. The soundtrack I found to be the expected familiar riffs, but nothing standing out.
In terms of gameplay, it’s a Telltale style adventure, making choices and selecting dialogue under time pressure, lots of quick time events, with some ‘action’ sequences and light puzzle solving. In the case of the latter two, neither are very good. The action sequences outside of quicktime events involve shooting galleries where you can moved between a couple of fixed positions and have to choose your moment to pop up and fire back. The animations and aim are clunky at best, and the game often sends vast numbers of enemies at you. There’s one sequence early on where it lets you move and shoot targets at the same time, and then it abandons it for fixed in place clunky cover shooting.
For the puzzle solving, a lot of it involves scanning with a tricorder, which swiftly becomes boring. You scan things using 3 different modes while being restricted to a very slow walk around the environments.
With regards to the dialogue and quick time events, they are as expected for the most part. I would say it would have been nice to have several parts of the game where you could just wander the ship, take in the atmosphere between missions and talk to characters without time pressure. This was something Elite Force 1 and 2 did well (it also did scanning with the tricorder a lot better too). The game doesn’t have that, to be fair there are quieter moments of reflection of the character, but there’s no moment where the pace of the game really slows down and allows you to explore and just drink into the atmosphere of the ship.
On to the story then, which is really, regardless of previous issues, where the game lives and dies. There are spoilers from this point out.
My wife and I picked this game as the first game we played together after many months not doing and as a bit of a coda because we had binged TNG and DS9 instead. This seemed like a good way to round those off and get us back in. In atmosphere and style it does feel much more similar to those shows than the newer stuff. There is a lot of character drama, though most of it is centred around command decisions and disagreements over serious moral dilemmas rather than crying over feelings and trauma ala nu-trek.
Unfortunately the game on several occasions seems to steer away from the really interesting narrative choices into simpler stuff that supports the very actiony paced nature of the game. For example, the early part of the game sets up an interesting dilemma of a conflict between two races feuding over a moon which major resources in. Both sides have points to their arguments. This is binned within a couple of hours when it turns out evil aliens are taking over the bodies of both sides and trying to take over everything.
Similarly there seems to be an interesting plot about the Captain cracking under pressure and whether he needs to be relieved, but it turns out instead he’s been taken over by an evil alien.
While TNG and DS9 had massive threats, often their best episodes were much smaller scale and quieter, or they built up into the threats that put the whole Federation at risk. Here within the course of a ten hour game, we go from doing repairs and setting out on a mediation mission between two minor races to fighting a massive mega evil alien space ship that threatens the whole galaxy. Bluntly it’s a little bit shlocky.
I’d also say I was frustrated that at points the game wouldn’t let me outright take characters to task and tell them to shut up or be confined to quarters if they had a problem with my decisions, with one notable exception towards the end of the game.
Still despite all my complaints, the story still motored along at fair pace and was exciting, leading to both some fun twists and turns and some interesting moral decisions and questions posed. It is interesting in seeing the perspective of both a petty officer in the lower decks, and a commander who is the first officer on the bridge. The game really took off towards the end, where despite turning into a big battle against a giant spaceship, you are parachuted by events into the captain’s chair and have to make the big decisions. This is where the game really shined. It does some good character work as well, with most characters being either interesting or likeable. The main villains are possibly an exception, being rather generic though.
I really liked the fact that the game didn’t pull punches and have the characters who had been taken over by aliens magically cured in the end. I was worried this would be the case, but still decided to make tough choices at points, eg willingly kill people, and the game felt mature in not pulling the rug and saying ahh but you could have made them better. It doesn’t outright say what will happen to them, and many are left alive, so that ambiguity to me adds some interest.
Overall then, if you are an old school trekkie and want a throwback game, this is worth hunting down a copy, but don’t expect it not to have flaws.
