Star Trek: Voyager - Across the Unknown

---{ Graphics }--- ☐ You forget what reality is ☐ Beautiful ☑ Good ☐ Decent ☐ Bad ☐ Don‘t look too long at it ☐ MS-DOS This game was clearly made on a budget, and that should be taken into account. The cutscenes are really nice - better than most mobile games, and generally on-par with the ads for those crap graphics. The character models can be questionable at times, and the portraits are similarly odd, but they aren't bad and have some style to them. If you obsess over graphics, you'll be left wanting, so just like the show itself, approach as a flawed gem. ---{ Gameplay }--- ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ It's just gameplay ☐ Mehh ☐ Watch paint dry instead ☐ Just don't The gameplay loop is... complicated. As can be seen from the other reviews, some people have terrible RNG experiences, and that can ruin a playthrough experience. I've had mixed results on normal difficulty, but the overall concept (and Voyager being my favorite series) goes some way towards saving the experience. The ship combat feels underbaked - this isn't Star Trek Online or Legacy - but is infrequent enough to be a sore spot, but not a dealbreaker. The standout experience is the story, which I will address later. ---{ Audio }--- ☐ Eargasm ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ Not too bad ☐ Bad ☐ I'm now deaf Generally authentic sound effects, which adds to the charm. No voice acting outside of some chapter introductions from Tuvok and Tom Paris. Unfortunately, it feels like Tim Russ is a little rusty on Tuvok, and Paris sounds like he's recording a podcast (which the actor has been doing as "The Delta Flyers" for those who want to listen in). But their inclusion is still appreciated, and hopefully this experiment can show Paramount that there is a market to provide a higher-budget experience. ---{ Audience }--- ☐ Kids ☐ Teens ☑ Adults ☐ Grandma Star Trek always skews to an older crowd, but teens who also find an appreciation for Voyager should also be at home. ---{ PC Requirements }--- ☐ Check if you can run paint ☐ Potato ☑ Decent ☐ Fast ☐ Rich boi ☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer Lower-end systems may struggle on the visuals, but the dev sets the minimums at PROCESSOR: AMD Ryzen 5 2600 or Intel Core i5-8500 | GRAPHICS: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB) or AMD Radeon RX 580 (8GB) ---{ Game Size }--- ☐ Floppy Disk ☑ Old Fashioned ☐ Workable ☐ Big ☐ Will eat 15% of your 1TB hard drive ☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it ☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data 11GB. ---{ Difficulty }--- ☐ Just press 'W' ☐ Easy ☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☐ Significant brain usage ☐ Difficult ☐ Dark Souls There are a lot of systems to learn about, and they aren't always the most obvious. The hardest for me was the research systems and navigating the different trees. Once you get the hang of them, it takes longer to master those skills... and a lot of RNG luck. ---{ Grind }--- ☐ Nothing to grind ☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks ☐ Isn't necessary to progress ☑ Average grind level ☐ Too much grind ☐ You'll need a second life for grinding Depending on your choices, the grind varies sector to sector, getting harder (as it arguably should) after the halfway point. In my run, it felt like the halfway point had a rough spike in the difficulty curve, but this could be RNG/my own lacking skillset in this genre. ---{ Story }--- ☐ No Story ☐ Some lore ☐ Average ☑ Good ☐ Lovely ☐ It'll replace your life Decisions and consequences. Sometimes, you can't follow the show because of missing tech or people. Sometimes, following the show leads to a worse outcome. The fact that the game remakes these situations is a mixed bag, because the mission names are generally the same as the episode titles, so someone like me can read the title and already know where its going. Again, mixed bag. On the one hand, excellent fan service from a dev team that seems to largely be fans of the show. On the other, it kills any suspense, and some story elements are a case of "when do we get to the fireworks factory?" ---{ Game Time }--- ☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee ☐ Short ☑ Average ☐ Long ☐ To infinity and beyond Varies based on your experience. There's also a way to finish the game in the first sector (teased in the trailers). ---{ Price }--- ☐ It's free! ☑ Worth the price ☑ If it's on sale ☐ If u have some spare money left ☐ Not recommended ☐ You could also just burn your money I intentionally picked two here. If you, like me, are fully into the series and have the money to spare, I think full price is a good purchase. If you see Voyager as "good but I like DS9 better", you might also be at home. If you're less familiar, or understandably feel burned from the mobile games and/or Infinite dumpster fires, a sale is a good excuse to try this one out. ---{ Bugs }--- ☐ Never heard of ☐ Minor bugs ☑ Can get annoying ☐ ARK: Survival Evolved ☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs I haven't seen any bugs personally, but there are enough noises in the other reviews to show that I may just not have noticed them. ---{ ? / 10 }--- ☐ 1 ☐ 2 ☐ 3 ☐ 4 ☐ 5 ☐ 6 ☐ 7 ☑ 8 ☐ 9 ☐ 10 Taking the fandom and budget into account, I'd say this is still a really good experience. It isn't a groundbreaking experience, but it doesn't try to be. Star Trek fans will be most at home, and if you happen to like resource management without the investment, your experience may be underwhelming. Looking forward to similar experiences from the same team if Paramount plays nicely with the concept. ---{ Author }--- ☑ https://vojtastruhar.github.io/steam-review-template

If you are a Star Trek fan, you owe it to yourself to play this game because it's the best Trek game we've gotten in a looooong time. It perfectly captures the essence of the 90s shows I grew up on and love so very much, it really feels like playing through a great episode of Voyager each sector you go through. You do have the ability to make some choices that go against the canon and they do feel meaningfully different, so much so that I'm planning a full non canon run my next time through. This is a resource manager game but I feel it's very well balanced on the standard mode. I have not tried Years of Hell yet as I am still optimizing my strategy on standard difficulty but what I have played so far leaves some room for error there, and the casual difficulty allows for tons of mistakes so if you are a Trek fan who hasn't played this genre before, know that you can jump in and get yourself acclimated on the casual difficulty before you move up. The game is heavily dependent upon RNG, there's no getting around that, and that's really the biggest pain point here. You can do things to mitigate that to a certain extent with research and ship upgrades, but you will be at the mercy of RNGesus for several side quests along with picking up resources at various POI in every system. There are also additional curveballs the game will throw at you at various points on your journey, so this isn't a game where you can ever really feel totally secure in your operation. That keeps it interesting and exciting to me. Bottom line, if you grew up on Trek like I did, do yourself a favor and get this gem of a game. It's what we've been asking for.

Unfortunately, I have to join the dissatisfied players. The game seems visually fine to me, and I could probably even tolerate the amount of text, but I really can’t handle the way landing missions are evaluated. What influenced me to buy the game was the screen showing the construction of various ship departments, which strongly resembles XCOM—that’s probably the most entertaining part. The rest is just boring, and essentially it’s just storytelling while you collect various resources on planets. The story is fixed, and you’re just following its tracks. You have no chance to influence whether someone dies, because it’s generated randomly.

A must play for fans of Voyager. Getting a chance to play through so many story beats and make different choices is a joy. The game play cycles between three modes, ship managment, away missions and starship battles keeping the loop varied. Game also comes with modular difficulty allowing you to tune up and down specific parts to suit your skill level and desire for comfiness.

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If you're a fan of Voyager and 4x space games, this game is for you. As a fan of both, I was shocked to play a Star Trek game that was good, combining 4x mechanics with semi active space combat and a fun hero system for away missions. I've played 4 runs so far, twice I got the crew back home, each in totally unique ways. I also had runs where most of the main characters died, or the crew mutinied against me, or where I was able to recruit unlikely allies or save characters who die in the show. The default difficulty is hard. If you want a more narrative experience, feel free to lower the difficulty. There are a lot of systems in the game, and runs can vary massively. In terms of negatives, there is a day one DLC that should have been part of the base game. I do recommend it, but only on sale. In addition, I had frequent crashes on one computer, and a memory leak on another. This is a decent 4x game but a great a Star Trek simulator. Play through a good chunk of Voyager episodes and make decisions that have lasting impact for the rest of the playthrough. Finally a Star Trek game that feels like Star Trek and that has massive replayability. A solid 8/10 for me only notched a couple of points due to day 1 DLC and stability issues.

The best game in years, especially for fans of the series! If only it didn't crash yet.