Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown is an upcoming story driven survival-strategy game set in the classic Star Trek universe, where you relive the highs and lows of the journey of the USS Voyager as originally shown in the 1995-2001 TV show, Star Trek: Voyager. The game is being developed by Gamexcite who in the past have primarily made mobile games and only made games based on the Asterix & Obelix comic book series so this may seem like an odd choice for the Hamburg based team, however, a first look at the newly released demo reveals that the Gamexcite may be exactly what Trekkies like myself have been waiting for. In this review I will discuss the gameplay, audio and visuals, and story that has been shown so far in the demo, with any information about the plot being kept to this last section, so if you want to avoid spoilers then you only need to skip that part.
Requirements
The required specs for Across the Unknown have not yet been published on its Steam page, but the demo is about 7GB and I was able to run it comfortably with no lags or crashes on my Steam Deck at medium settings and with Proton Hotfix enabled. The demo seems to only be playable natively on Windows, although the final game is going to be released on PC, Playstation 5, and Xbox X|S. The demo already has working controller support but is designed with keyboard and mouse in mind.
Gameplay
The gameplay is split into four aspects that are pretty well integrated and requires you to balance your actions in each of them to ensure success. The first of these is Space Travel, where you instruct your ship to scan planets, other ships, and various stellar phenomena in your current system to determine what resources they may have. You can then travel to any of these objects and interact with them to pass a skill check based on the equipment and crew you have available to harvest those resources, or if there’s a story event there you get to engage with that and move on to the Away Missions section of the game. This is the primary way to gather resources such as Deuterium which is needed to fuel your Warp Core and power your ship, and Duranium which is needed to repair and construct things.
Currently this is very basic and a little repetitive, with no skill or check required to scan anything (although you can level up Stellar Cartography which suggests more advanced scanning will be needed in the future) and very little variability in the resources or consequences you get based on the risk you put in. However, I expect once there are more random events and the Sector Threat Level is fully implemented (shown in the top left of the image below, currently doesn’t do anything) this will be interesting enough that alongside the other aspects it won’t feel like a chore and there will be bigger rewards and consequences for taking risks.
The Away Missions, that I mentioned earlier, require you to select up to three of your crew to deal with whatever situation is going on. Each crewmember has a series of stats relating to things like science, engineering, or command (y’know, like the uniform colours?) which are used to complete various challenges. You can have multiple crew cooperate on a single challenge to reduce the difficulty, but having a crewmember try and perform two challenges in a row will grant them a penalty due to fatigue.
This system is very similar (almost identical in fact) to the one used in the mobile game Star Trek: Timelines, although this is not necessarily a bad thing. In Across the Unknown there currently doesn’t seem to be a real penalty for failing (other than missing out on the reward for succeeding), whereas in Timelines a single failure could force you to repeat the whole mission. Furthermore, in Timelines the Away Missions were the only way to acquire items that were needed in large amounts to progress in any way, whilst in Across the Unknown they’re simply for story progression. Putting aside the Timeline comparisons for a moment, the Away Missions are an interesting way to let you make a series of decisions in a short span of time that can affect future events in the story. They’re still a little bare bones at the moment, and it would be good if they added a tangible way to see how your changes may be affecting the story as a whole, such as relationship trackers with various factions.
Next up is Ship Management. This involves the repair and upgrade of various rooms in Voyager, which enable you to access more choices in events, keep the morale of your crew high, and even research different technologies in a surprisingly expansive tech tree. Most of the resources you gather whilst travelling will be spent here, and the most important thing is to keep your Warp Core fuelled as that will determine how many cycles you can last before you run out of power. Cycles are the measurement of time across the game, with travel between planets taking anywhere from 2 to 9 cycles and repair and construction happening during this time. Notably, cycles only pass when you’re travelling or when you choose to skip to the next cycle, so you’re always able to take a step back and plan your next move without any time pressure.
Ship Management also strongly resembles several mobile games (Fallout Shelter and Trexels just to name two off the top of my head), but it goes a lot more in depth and, like with Away Missions, strips out all the irritating pay-to-play aspects that are part and parcel of too many mobile games. Honestly, this is probably my favourite part of the game, as it gives you a lot of free will to repair, upgrade, and build a wide range of rooms pretty much however and wherever you want in the ship. Some of the rooms require Tritanium which is very scarce in the demo but I suspect will be more accessible in the full game when you’re actually expected to do things outside of the basic tutorial, and most of them only need Deuterium which is available from every other planet and also can be gained by clearing debris inside the ship itself. Furthermore, all the build times are relatively quick and pass as you travel (no stupid 24 hour build times that you can pay premium currency to skip) and you can build additional engineering offices to get extra build teams at very little cost. As well as building things, you also get to manage how much energy your warp core is producing, pick rations to feed your crew which can affect morale, and choose different researches to unlock new rooms and improve your ship in combat or negotiations.
The final part of gameplay is Space Combat. Here you get to give orders to target various systems aboard the enemy ship, perform manoeuvres to dodge attacks or better position yourself, or even flee if a combat is going badly. You also choose up to three crewmembers to grant special abilities during the combat, can order crew to repair damages, and even fire torpedoes to deal extra damage.
For Space Combat, Gamexcite definitely took inspiration from several other games. The most obvious of these is FTL, as the mid-battle layout of the ship showing the health of various systems is very reminiscent of the enemy ships in Subset Games’ hit roguelike. Choosing different crew with special abilities is also very like the aforementioned Timelines game, as is the way the ship mostly controls itself. There’s only one Space Combat in the demo which you can’t replay without replaying the whole game, so it’s difficult to get a much of a sense of how it will feel in the final release, however, the option to give different orders and even switch between attacking different enemy ships when they attack you as a group do seem to provide more depth and complexity.
Audio and Visuals
The audio is unfortunately the most disappointing part of the game. There is no voice acting at all and no music from the original show, likely due to the cost of licensing. The sound effects and generic music is otherwise ok, but I for one very much hope that Gamexcite decide to at least splash out on hiring voice actors who sound somewhat like the original cast, especially considering how much text there is which currently scrolls silently along your screen, but I imagine that will rely on the popularity of the demo.
The visuals on the other hand are another story. Whilst not groundbreaking on the medium settings I played at, the space scenes (which there were at least two of every time there was a story moment) look better than they do in a lot of classic Trek shows and made me feel really nostalgic (I know what I’m doing after current my Deep Space Nine rewatch). The LCARS UI also looked lovely and were well integrated with the gameplay controls. I was even pleasantly surprised by the quality of the art pieces that are shown at each stage of an Away Mission. I’d expected repeated generic images or even stills ripped from the show, but the stylised paintings of various classic scenes are superb and much better than the alternatives. My only complaint comes with the bridge crew scenes, as currently they just depict crewmembers standing stationary and staring out of the screen despite them appearing to be fully rendered 3D models, although this latter fact does give me hope that there are more plans for them. I would also suggest setting the brightness to a bit above what the game recommends otherwise you don’t get to properly appreciate the visuals.
Story (Contains Spoilers!)
The story so far is a very close retelling of the first two episodes of the Voyager show. You start off on a mission to the Badlands to chase down some Marquis (that’s morally grey space terrorists for the uninitiated). Upon arriving you end up being catapulted across to the other side of the galaxy where you find a strange space station run by an old man who has captured the Marquis. Upon rescuing the Marquis you decide to team up to try and get back home. You then get into a fight with a group of aliens called the Kazon who want to use the strange space station to control this area of the galaxy. This leads you to your first proper choice, as you can either use the station to return home (thereby ending the story early but giving the station over the Kazon) or destroy it (stranding yourself here but upholding your Starfleet values to protect the weak and allowing you to actually play the bulk of the game). This marks the end of the tutorial and the demo, however clips on the Steam page show various other events such as interactions with the dreaded Borg and even the notorious Tuvix incident.
Verdict
On the whole I’d say I was pleasantly surprised with the demo for Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown, although I’ll note that I came at it expecting very little. From the earlier trailers and previews I could already tell that many gameplay elements were similar to those from mobile games so I was pleased when I found them to be more fleshed out and less predatory than I was worried they might be. Furthermore, Star Trek games have always been very hit and miss, and my last brush with a Star Trek licensed game was Star Trek: Infinite which ended up being a deeply disappointing Stellaris Clone with a shoddy Star Trek paintjob.
So far, the gameplay was fun and I got an hour and a half of pure nostalgic joy before I reached the end of what’s available. The visuals were definitely what I hoped for in a Star Trek game, and I’m excited to see how they handle the variety of choices we ought to have in the final release. And honestly I didn’t mind too much that the original music was lacking, the game stands up well enough without it and if I really want it I can always play it in the background. The lack of voice acting did sting a little, but not so much as to make the game feel dull.
Would I recommend you play the demo? Absolutely, no questions asked. Not enough games release demos anymore, with too many resorting to early access releases which basically make players pay to playtest them. The worst thing that can happen if you play the demo is you waste about an hour and decide not to buy the final product. I’d personally say I’d be willing to pay about £20 on the full game if it’s all at the current quality, or more if we get significant improvements in gameplay or visuals. There’s not an official release date announced yet, but it’s going straight in my diary when it’s announced.
