Star Trek: Voyager - Across the Unknown

Excellent game displaying great knowledge of what Star Trek is about as well as cunning gameplay methods. A must own for any fan of the genre. Although in today's age, I can only say I miss something as not so hard to achieve and implement as a recorded AI voice over representation of the actors and then some per text. Great work nonetheless

I really wanted to like this game. Sadly, it seems the devs spent more money on PR than actual game. The game falls short of its potential and even its promise. Its sad. It doesnt feel like Trek just another generic text based turn game that is janky as hell. Go Play Star Trek Resurgence instead.

Not perfect but a good game

its fun but it needs like a post story randomized Starfleet mission mode , or some sort of rogue lite style unlocks (q-continuum permanent boosts) or like what if scenario runs (what if voyager was a diff class of ship? lets you have diff layouts) because I don't see a need to play it again other than intentionally doing missions differently. But its also one of the only games in the last while I felt compelled to finish

If you are a Star Trek: Voyager fan or perhaps just a Star Trek fan then perhaps you will like this. I do not imagine this game being appealing to anybody else though.

This is one of those games where I wish star ratings were allowed rather than a strict up/down, but I'd give it probably 3.5 out of 5 stars. It's definitely enjoyable and is worth a play, but it does feel tragically uneven or unfinished at times. (Possible gentle spoilers below.) It boils down to essentially an old text-based choose-your-own-adventure game, combined with many elements of XCOM and RPGs. The storyline is intricately woven with your choices, and it is quite impressive how your actions - and a heavy dose of chance - have ramifications further down the line, including the availability of characters and their impact on story. Technology choices feel like they have a natural impact on events in a way not seen in most games. This is the core strength of the game and invites me to replay it to see how else things could have gone. Indeed, there are a lot of profoundly different outcomes possible compared to the TV series, which is fun to explore. It's clear the game was lovingly made by fans of the TV series, exploring its potential without contradicting or undermining it, and with amazing attention to detail in many places. I am admittedly not much of a Star Trek fan (compared to Star Wars), but I did find Voyager to be the most compelling Star Trek series behind STNG, and this game did a good job drawing me in emotionally to get Voyager home while trying to have the best impact on the Delta Quadrant that I could. And it is, outright, a fun game to play -- it's fun to make hard choices between technological priorities and risk/benefit calculations amidst the stress of never quite having enough resources early on in the normal difficulty, and eventually getting comfortable and powerful and just getting to enjoy the storylines. Somehow the game really does deliver that authentic "Delta Quadrant experience" as it promises. Away missions are also quite surprisingly a blast and are pretty neat with the many ways they can unfold. Now for the bad: I don't personally enjoy the huge degree to which chance determines outcomes in everything that happens, although I do recognize that's one of the central conceits of the game. It contributes to the atmosphere of Voyager's fate standing on the edge of a cliff, but it's also frustrating at times when all the preparation in the world falls victim to a bad roll of the dice. Some people enjoy that; I don't so much. Combat is also shockingly repetitive and feels like an add-on to the game. It is at first pretty neat to see Voyager maneuver around the enemy ships firing phasers, but then every battle turns out to be an utterly identical joust with a different model for the enemy ship. You approach head-on and then have a stats-off with the enemy. In my playthrough, I always put a lot of attention into trying to maneuver to disable certain enemy components or defend the side of Voyager with shields down early on, but in retrospect I'm not sure that even mattered. This is one area of the game where there is a strange dichotomy: the graphics are pretty and the underlying mechanics are solid, but there's no variety to be had to build on that strong foundation! It could have been so much more if there had been occasional bigger battles with more than a handful of ships, or perhaps if certain battles had been in the combat engine instead of text adventure. Some of the bigger ships also feel like they lack detail compared to Voyager, which is itself gorgeously rendered. It's also a great mystery how the designers chose which parts of the game were going to be done with voiceover and which would be text-only. There are precisely two parts with voiceover: the personal logs of two beloved characters that they got the original actors for, and the "skill is ready, captain" guy during combat who isn't actually a character on the show. Everything else is just text. (So why is it talking to me with one line over and over again during combat instead of just a beep or something?) There's a similar dichotomy going on between the lovely solar system/exterior ship/interior ship graphics and the relatively crude bridge-scene personal graphics. This was most jarring at the beginning of the game: it starts up with a lovely presentation of a top-tier game you're about to play with full voiceover, and then tosses you into a text adventure with a bridge scene that looks like it's from an early 2000s game. It is fun once you get used to this and accept what you've done by purchasing the game, but this is how it goes: In one aspect it's great and polished, and in others it feels so rough and unfinished - it's just so haphazard and inconsistent in its quality that it feels like it was tossed together by several different teams who didn't communicate and didn't work together toward a single coherent game experience. I really wish they'd gotten their act together just a *little bit* better for this game and it could have been really great, but bottom line: it delivers on the fun of diving deeper into the Voyager storyline and the roads not taken, which is great if, like me, you enjoyed the original TV show. It's good at getting you invested in your choices and at striking exactly the right tone, where you feel like you're struggling to survive in the Delta Quadrant, and are able to patch it together but are still at the mercy of bad luck. (A little extra challenge would have been appreciated toward the end of the game on normal difficulty.) Pros: Text-adventure style choices are fun, shipbuilding a-la XCOM is fun, away missions are fun, and just generally exploring space and finding storylines from the show is fun. Everything is very faithful to the show. Much of the art and graphics are lovely. Cons: I wish they had stuck with either all-text or all-voice-acting. It's a weird mishmash as it is that feels cheap. Ship-to-ship combat needs more variety/depth/challenge. Art and graphics feel like completely different teams worked on different parts of the game without oversight or with a rushed deadline - which I bet is exactly what happened. I played on max graphics settings in 4K on an RTX 5080 and never had any performance problems. Being a space game with glowing shiny things on a black background, looks especially good on an OLED monitor.

Early Review..... Enjoying so far, biggest disappointment up to now is the lack of voice acting. I get it if they couldn't afford the original actors, I really do, but even a close approximation/knock offs would have been better than just text. It's 2026! A great game for Star Trek Voyager Fans like myself. Will update as I progress. Thumbs up so far!