Written by JP from Gabbing About

Let’s get this part out of the way now… As a fan of both Star Trek and narrative driven titles such as The Walking Dead, and The Wolf Among Us, Star Trek: Resurgence is my flavour of raktajino. With that being said, I am long enough in the tooth to be able to take off my rose-tinted goggles!
I was so looking forward to jumping into this adventure, one made by a rather small team, but crafted with equal measures of love, respect and nerdiness.
You’ll notice that I don’t (won’t) touch too much on the biggest positive this game has, the story. This is for two reasons: I want to keep it as spoiler free as possible. Also, my experience will be different to hundreds of others due to the nature of this game genre. So, if you want to ‘skip to the good part’ then head towards the end!

Make Way

Star Trek: Resurgence is a story of two individuals thrust into a galactic conflict that will have them questioning not only themselves, but those they respect and care for. I found myself thrown around, wanting every decision you make to be true to myself.

What would I do if I were faced with saving one person, versus saving dozens, hundreds, heck even whole quadrants. Would I honour to the “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” or not?

For how Resurgence plays? It’s a (mostly) 3rd person, narratively driven game, where you can dramatically change how the story plays out, how relationships start, stop or continue – you can even check your results against other plays on your platform! With action sequencies that see you piloting shuttles, using your tricorder to solve puzzles in a very Trek way, and there is even a dash or seven of phaser combat.


Phasers on Stun

On the combat of Resurgence, it’s by far the weakest part of the whole experience. It usually a wave-based sequence, with an increasing number of enemies or risks to tackle over a minute or two. The character you’re controlling will be able to take damage 3 times before you are greeted with a game over screen, which will offer you the chance to replay the section under the same conditions, or via story mode. I took the story mode route once, as on a rather frustrating section I was tasked with disabling an enemy, yet it was rare I have line-of-sight on the enemy… when I was on story mode, I discovered I could clip my shots through the wall.

What would make this a non-issue for me? If you could invert the controls. That’s correct, there is no look inversion option in Star Trek: Resurgence. As a player who has played inverted since Desert Strike, this was a huge learning curve for me, and I can say that even after around 13 hours, I’d still not adjusted. As you can see below, the number of options within Resurgence is minimal.

Cutscenes are important in a narrative driven title. It’s how you see your choices played out. In Resurgence you will pick from several options in response to a situation or conversation, some of these dramatically shift the whole story. The quirk to this, and it’s not limited to Telltale Games or Dramatic Labs (who were founded many former Telltale Games staff), is that a cutscene can make a camera cut and a person or object is not where it was a few seconds before. I adjusted to this rather quickly, but it made it into my notes, so it made it into the review!

Menu navigation: it’s simple, it works, until it doesn’t. During a tutorial on using a Tricorder, you’re promoted to press X to unholster the tool. However, during a tutorial it also acts like you’ve pressed the pause button, which means if you press X, you go back to the main menu! Yup, progress was lost. Seeing as you can’t skip dialogue, I had to replay the previous sequence again.
Facial animations… now, I feel like an odd one out here, as I have seen/read lots of positivity around these. Yet, for me, it felt like everyone was listed from The Sims. It was often off-putting seeing characters look like they were impersonating the Pendari from Star Trek: Voyager or seeming like they were overacting to try and land an emotional expression.

The games audio is little like marmite to me, there were times when I really thought they’d land a recognisable tune to get my arm hairs to stand-up, but also nope. What my ears were treated to, however, wasn’t unpleasant! Each scene felt accompanied well with music that served as an extra character. The only hiccup was during the introduction of a very, very family face, their hologram sounded like the audio had been shot via the actor’s phone, then sent over to be imported in. It was a huge miss for me, one that took away from the scene, and the overall seriousness of the message. Thankfully, during follow-up appearances, their audio was much improved.

You Are Not Prepared

Illidan Stormrage is in the above screenshot. That’s right, Liam O’Brien lends his legendary voice to the cast of Star Trek: Resurgence! He voices Urmott, a character that is with you through a lot of the story, but without spoilers, I won’t say more!

On the story, it’s very Trek. A story driven by individuals, with some obvious and some not so obvious story beats. It has some massive call backs to The Next Generation, that I never thought would have been a thing. Several times I thought I knew what was coming, and I was proven wrong. It didn’t matter which character I was playing, be it Carter Diaz from the lower decks of the Resolute, or Jara Rydek – the new First Officer, filling some shoes that others feel are theirs. I felt every option I made, every story consequence through the great deliveries from most all of the voice actors and the writing.

Two standouts, for very different reasons, are Piotr who voices Ambassador Spock. His delivery, the little nuances in his words, had me checking this wasn’t done by some AI who had listened to thousands of hours of the great Leonard Nimoy. Hats off to you, Piotr.

Jim Meskimen, the many of a thousand voices. I simply did not like his character, which may have been the point, but for this man to be a Starfleet Captain… and to be so damn selfish, simply nope! Plot device or not, nope.
The rest of the cast did a great job, and I hope we see them return in a sequel. There is going to be a sequel. Right?

The Final Frontier

During my 13 or so hours with Star Trek: Resurgence, I had a wonderful time with the story. The characters, planets and ships were very, very Trek.

Where things fell down? It has to be the technical polish and maybe some self-entitlement from this reviewer?
Would I recommend this game? Yes, yes, I would, and not only to Trekkies and Telltale Games fans. We, the gaming Populus, need new experiences, and we won’t get them if chances aren’t taken.

Star Trek: Resurgence was a chance taken, and by God, Jim, damn it, it was a chance delivered!

Overall
  • 70%
    CX Score - 70%
70%

Summary

Pros

  • Sound design
  • They used the best Star Fleet Uniforms
  • Callbacks, but done in a way that enriches the narrative
  • Choices felt weighty

 

Cons

  • Character facial expressions
  • Phaser combat
  • No inverted controls, plus general poor list of options

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