Star Trek: Voyager - Across the Unknown

I will tentatively recommend this game. But it's certainty not for everyone. The criticisms others have about the punishment of off-canon choices and poor buggy combat are true. However, my main grip is that the developers should have rewarded and encouraged Voyager to choose a specific tech path over others. Perhaps 3 or so paths which would allow you to specialise and unlock unique choices. The game is fairly sweet though, especially for those who like Voyager, and I would welcome more of this sort of game in Star Trek.

As a massive Star Trek fan, I love this game, like the way you can build and customise your ship, find new crew and improve them, and well as getting them killed. Totally recommend it as its easy to pick up and learn.

Very good turn base game with a lot of replyability.

After 40 hours I can comfortably state that this game is a fair one. It has it's intricacies, it requires strategy, it's fun if you like the genre, it's not for everybody, and it surely is not a game that will be used to benchmark computers. I have some gripes with it: from a visual standpoint it's really a bit underwhelming. Don't get me wrong, it's functional, but seeing what other games do in the same "mental space" something more could have been done. At times it's a bit clunky or unpolished for example navigating the tech tree or the lack of a way to silence mission notifications. Space combat is definitively not a strong point as it's mostly automated and the abilities are absolutely random and sometimes nonsensical and cheesy (inspection from Kashyk is absolutely ridiculous especially against Borg vessels, as is the infiltration of Torark). As always with this kind of games, the resource management gameplay is relatively punishing at the beginning and the procurement of resources, being based on luck more than anything, can ruin a run even without making obvious mistakes, but by the third sector it becomes a non-factor if you are reasonably diligent in keeping everything topped off. The game doesn't punish you for trying stuff, the alternate outcomes are frequently interesting and major mistakes can be rectified by resetting the sector and thus replaying it or by strategically using the manual save function. I appreciated the fact that the manual save is a single slot, thus making the choice to use it a meaningful one. Certain dialogue paths lead to unexpected places and even negative outcomes can have interesting repercussions later down the line and the alternate stories are worth playing as those generate variety in replays. The story is a 1:1 extract of the tv series, with most of the important plots present, but unfortunately one of the things that have been left behind are the relationships among the "heroes" of the serie. This for me diminishes the immersion, and maybe a mechanic that kept track of friendships and\or love interests would have been cool to have in away missions, without turning the game in a dating simulator, but creating chances to effect the morale of the crew. Also the incidents on the holodeck are mostly absent as the only mention of something going wrong being one of the random events that force you to repair\update\build something. I would love to see this game evolve into a series of games based in the Star Trek universe, maybe looking at the lost eras between Kirk an Picard, or retracing the steps of other TV series. It's not a perfect game, it would greatly benefit from a polish pass, but it's a fair one that has given and will keep giving me a considerable amount of fun.

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.