Well, damn. The novelty of a brand new Star Trek: Voyager game tricked me into setting aside my natural cynicism, and I got burned. Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown, I’m sad to report, is about as tasty as Neelix’s cooking. A budget survival game that commits the worst sin: it’s just so bloody dull.
On paper, Voyager and the survival management genre is a perfect marriage. One of those couples who go all the way, right into the coffin. A crew lost on the other side of the galaxy, pursued by threats that include the Borg Collective, unable to get any assistance from daddy Starfleet. It’s a good fit.
But while Across the Unknown’s Steam demo technically has all the elements of a solid survival game and a good Voyager adaptation—scrabbling for resources, repairing and upgrading the ship, sending away teams into dangerous situations—it’s largely devoid of any excitement or drama.
Everything mostly plays out in text, accompanied by sparse art that’s generally serviceable but sometimes rather poor, and basic, dead-eyed character models. While the dialogue broadly captures the vibe of each crew member, it feels more like I’m playing with an off-brand crew rather than the real deal—a situation exacerbated by the complete lack of voice acting.
And look, I know, Voyager is 30 years old, but plenty of the core cast are still in the business and, as evidenced by Star Trek Online, still up for reprising their old roles. I’d even take someone doing an OK impression.
Star Trek actors have always done a lot of the heavy lifting with the shows’ scripts—which contained lots of great writing, but also lots of dry sci-fi bullshit. A committed actor can make even the dry stuff sing, though, and in Across the Unknown that’s even more necessary than usual.
The game starts with Voyager getting punted into the Delta Quadrant, with the opening act largely making you play through the series’ first episode. Or at least a knock-off that’s way more interested in getting you to scan for deuterium and construct bunk beds instead of more adventurous escapades.
Sure, there are still away missions. But these are just brief, Choose Your Own Adventure-style detours that seem determined to rush through anything that might run the risk of becoming interesting. Particularly disappointing is the decision to make these sequences so UI heavy—and the UI ain’t a looker. With such limited art, these sequences are more like text adventures than visual novels, but without evocative prose to carry them.
Voyage of the damned
All the away missions in the demo can be blasted through in a minute, leaving me filling my time with more scanning. The sector and system maps are reminiscent of Mass Effect’s space sections, but where BioWare went to ridiculous lengths to give each world a detailed description, Across the Unknown, a game about explorers charting a distant corner of the galaxy, doesn’t have much to say about most of the places you visit.
I guess the flavour would get in the way of my deuterium collecting.
When a combat encounter finally kicked off, I was thrilled. Finally, something to bring me out of my scanning stupor. But oh boy, it’s rough folks. The invasive UI, terrible SFX and janky ass ship movement made me almost long for the days when I just had to collect resources and deal with Tom Paris’s impotent attempts to come off as cool.
Star Trek ship combat has been done brilliantly before—shout out to Star Trek Online again—but Across the Unknown’s attempt is abysmal. I don’t know what part was worse: Voyager juddering through space like it’s being pushed by an easily-distracted toddler (I’ve never seen so much movement lag and rubberbanding in an offline game before), or when a destroyed enemy vessel randomly started firing on its allies instead of blowing up.
Across the Unknown follows up its sole combat encounter with its first Big Choice™: blow up the array that pulled Voyager into the Delta Quadrant, or use it to get home.
Now, this is a choice Janeway faced in the show, and she opted to destroy the array, stopping the kazon (Voyager’s half-hearted answer to klingons) from getting their hands on it. The allure of Across the Unknown is that you can make different choices. Now, obviously Voyager can’t go home—that would end the game immediately. But you might assume that picking this option would lead to a new crisis or some kind of non-canon detour.
Nope! It’s a completely fake choice.
You get to make a case for leaving the array alone, citing the Prime Directive (of course), and then you find out you simply can’t do it. So you’ve gotta blow up the array. After which, everyone will just act like you freely made that choice instead of being strong-armed into it, including your hot-headed soon-to-be-chief-engineer, who basically calls you an idiot for blowing up your only way home. It wouldn’t let us go home, B’Elanna! Lay off me!
And that’s your lot. It’s a weird note to end the demo on. “Hey, our game will let you make tough calls, but the only one we’ll show you is actually fake.”
I can’t say I’m itching to play the full thing. And it’s just kinda wild that a 30-year-old show, which hasn’t had a videogame spin-off in 25 years, has been resurrected for such a half-baked effort. Voyager deserves better.
Just go play Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force instead, if you really need some hot Voyager action. GOG has it for less than a tenner. And if shooters aren’t your speed, then check out Star Trek Online. You can grab it for free, ignore all the MMO bullshit, and just play through a frankly ridiculous number of authentic Star Trek season arcs.
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