Star Trek: Voyager - Across the Unknown

I didnt watch voyager and i m not a big trekkie, but i did watch some episodes of DS9 and new generation when it ran on TV when i was young, and i do like the general idea and setting of Star Trek I also like roguelite strategy games built around character groups & a base so this was an interesting game to me Overall i would say it is not a perfect game but a pretty good one, so i would recommend it: positives: + "base building" is similar to xcom, fallout shelter, the alters: you have rooms, you clear them out, you collect resources, and then you fill those rooms up with whatever you like. Placement is not relevant, and it is basically an inventory-management style task to get them laid out nicely. You cant build everything and and there is no one true answer on how to approach things +++ i like the away missions, i like the challenges and options in them + i liked the sectors with their planets to explore and random events on them (although they quickly start repeating) ++ the characters are well written and fun, it is fun to collect new ones for the journey and it is cool to see how they have an impact on the story and that it can continue without them as well. I also like their little side missions that randomly pop up and how some characters argue against helping others or dont agree with each other on some decisions you make along the story giving you different viewpoints for or against doing something ++ it all feels very true to Voyage and i felt i learnt a lot about the story of the series and its characters without watching it, i really did enjoy that. I noticed many of the quests and side quests were condensed stories from the actual series, which was really well integrated into the gameplay imo +++ you could have different outcomes than in the series, they really scripted the game for different choices and i really enjoyed this. most games just focus on giving you 3 choices at the very end of the game and thats it, but here the choices came early and could have lasting effects until the end. Also there is a nice overview at the end about each hero. Good stuff negatives: -- you cant make multiple savegames whenever you want. i read that on release it was worse as you only had autosaves. I wouldnt have played it in that state. Having a single save slot is okayish, but having none is a mess. I m used to playing games in "ironman mode" but i wouldnt wanna do that with this game, because of the other issues i will raise now -- sometimes there are quests that lock you out of options, huge decisive parts that get you new tech or a new recruit, based on a character being available. THere is no warning about this upfront. And sometimes this same mission chain asks you to send a character away, but now that they are away you cant use them in some context. No way of knowing this without looking this up or knowing the series maybe in and out or having played through the mission beforehand. I find that extremely frustrating. I m sort of a completionist. So what i did here was that i would reload an earlier save and this time keep the character available, unfortunately if u save too often u might not be able to go back far enough. I m not happy about this. Dont punish me for things i cant know about, without way to compensate for it -- I played on the 2nd highest difficulty because i wanted a bit of a challenge but not too much of it. I was quite annoyed. The ship is so smol i couldnt build everything i wanted no matter how well i optimized. Storage space was the worst bit. It feels very annoying when u lose resources because you are going over limit. Even worse: you can cheese this: just start building something and immediately pause building it: here is some free "storage" space for those resource. And I have seen this trick n other games before so i guessed this little helper quite quickly and it makes the whole thing just feel cheesey since the design doesnt seem to anticipate this, contradictory to otherwise being ultra tight about storage space. Pick one of the two: be lax or be strict, but dont make me cheese. Cargo space just holds one resource which felt like an artifical limitation and just forcing us to do extra work. Way too big of a building for just storing ONE resource, so u need 4 to extend all 4. Also difficulties reduce your min storage (wtf). Lots of odd design here. - I also wish i could have somehow found random quests or stuff that allow me to expand the ship into what looks like additional rooms, which forever remained as grey 2d images, oh well. I really wanted to end up with a full set of facilities in my ship. If i played this again i d probably deconstruct the trading aeroship bay thingy for storage or combat. - the planetary exploration got old fast: exploring planets requires u to hold a button and wait, for no benefit at all, it is just extra work since it costs nothing and takes no in-game time, it only costs your time. The events and option are repetitive. Building upgrade sometimes help sometimes dont help with your chances in those events. It seems that if you have a higher version than required for the option, it doesnt further boost chances, and from there it is just a single random roll. If you roll bad it can cost you dearly: morale, people dying, maybe a shuttle lost. I would always reload if something too punishing happened so clearly i chose a difficulty that was too high. I just do not see the fun in random dice roll like this. There was also way too little variety. And the options in the end just end up being "pick whatever is the greenest with the least red". There was not much of an option there most of the time, just luck. Could have had more depth, more variety, more choices, more possibility to react to catastrophic outcomes, and then i d have liked it more and it wouldnt have gotten borin so quickly. - research took way too long, had 3 labs with 3 heroes and it still took forever so i kept grinding before leaving to the next region - trading was annoying and trite, didnt enjoy it, took too long, i d always forget to check back on it - some important changes will pause the game for you so u can react, others not, weird! Science and finished buildings would do so, some other stuff not - there would be annoying comms beeps from quests sometiems when i intentionally didnt wanna answer it since it forces me to advance to the next region. Should be possible to mute or say you will handle it later ( to the game) o the ship battles had good and bad parts. To be honest after dozens of battles i still dont understand movement and positioning, it felt super weird and glitchy to me, but it was a fun little minigame nevertheless. Better than auto resolving it but if it was clear i d win i d rather still autoresolve since it is not so fun that i d wanna ""waste" my time on it.

Awesome game, I would say a must play for any Voyager fans. Likely a good game even if you didn't watch the series and like the style of gameplay. I've played it twice and it does have descent replayability. The graphics is really nice, at least on higher settings. Absolutely love the star shaders! It's a bit rough in the difficulty balance, either easy or hard, but seems they made an update for that recently. Combat is a bit rough but still fun enough. The main loop is pretty good I think though I would like to have seen more missions in a playthough. They seem to be randomized to some degree and depend on your roll when interacting with resources and choices. I do really like the room building and resouce management. It's a bit difficult to weigh the risks with the colors though. I get that they don't want to tell you exactly what happens but some outcomes like the morale would have been nice to get a hint of. Some impacts are really steep but hard to gauge beforehand. You could get stuck a bit or loose out on missions if you didn't have specific rooms or certain heroes. Would have been nice to have fallback options, I almost got stuck with the Hirogens in the main story. But dispite minor issues it gets a high score from me, though I'm likely biased since I'm a Voyager fan.

Ein Muss für alle Fans von Star Trek Voyager. Tolles Spiel.

Am a Trek fan from TOS until ENT and this game is just brilliant. Really enjoying it. Put 9 hours in on day 1 alone. Well worth your time. Fun Roguelike gameplay that generates fun interesting twists on the show's story.

I was quite excited for this game when it was announced. I played the demo and now the full version and I am still impressed with the amount of choices and storylines available. I love how they have a few cast members do the voice over reading of logs between stages, but it would be nice to have more VO work overall, but I also know that takes a ton of time AND money from the devs to pull off. Just put on some VOY in the background, and you will be fully immersed!

its a decent space resource management sim... worth 20$ for the 12 or so hrs of fun. it follows the show pretty decently. its not terribly hard/doesn't have a steep learning curve. that being said its lame there's like no voice acting except paris and tuvok (although he sounds like he has a cold or something in all his lines). cool they got them on board but likely was 90% of the cost of this game and why it kinda suffers in the repetitiveness in combat and other areas. it was decent, his some nostalgia points kinda fun strategy but its a 6/10 at best.

As a big Voyager fan I must say I am impressed with the game at my current progress. The game seems to follow the TV series but with a series of twists due to certain choices that must be made when prompted to do so. The game has resource management, away missions and exploration. I am still learning the ropes but I am having a blast with this game. My biggest gripe with the game is the lack of voice acting. I would happily pay extra for a DLC to get some of the actors back to get this added into the game in a future update. As a Trek fan, I highly recomend picking up this game.

---{ 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