Star Trek Voyager – Across the Unknown is based on the TV show where Federation starship Voyager has been stranded in the delta quadrant, 70,000 light years from home. The player takes on the role of Captain Kathryn Janeway, as she tries to return her ship and crew safely back to Earth in the alpha quadrant.
I watched the TV show when it originally aired a couple of decades ago, so while I know who the characters are, I could only remember a few vague details about the storylines, which meant that this game felt like a fresh experience for me.
[h1]Gameplay (medium quality)[/h1]
• Voyager’s journey home is divided into 12 sectors of space, which each contain a main quest and a few side quests. During these quests you’ll perform a variety of activities including exploration, diplomacy, away missions, and starship combat.
• After arriving in the delta quadrant, Voyager is severely damaged, many rooms have been completely destroyed, and several decks are inaccessible because they don’t even have life support. Over the course of your journey you’ll need to rebuild the ship by clearing out the wreckage and replacing it with functional rooms, similar to how you expand the base in Xcom.
• In addition to key rooms like the bridge, mess hall, main engineering, holodeck, and shuttle bay, you’ll need to add crew quarters and observation lounges where the crew can rest, hydroponics bays to grow food, sick bays to treat injured crew, engineering offices to repair the ship, cargo bays to store resources, science labs to research new technologies, and weapon control rooms and shield generators for when you engage hostile starships in combat.
• Each room requires a certain amount of power from the warp core to function, as well as a number of available crew members, so the more you expand the ship, the more resources you’ll need. Many rooms can be upgraded to increase the benefit provided, but this also increases their power cost. However, you can manually disable rooms at any time to save power and free up workers. For example, after some battles I had lots of injured crew, so I eventually built three sick bays to quickly deal with a crisis, but I didn’t need them all online when everybody was healthy.
• Each sector contains a few star systems where you’ll find various planets, space stations, debris fields, and other points of interest (POI) where you’ll be able to gather resources including fuel for the warp core, food for the crew, materials for building/upgrading/repairing rooms, science points for researching new technologies, and recruit new crew members to work in each room.
• Each POI will give the player a few options to choose from which could have different positive or negative outcomes. This is a risk/reward mechanic, as the safer options usually give you fewer resources, while the more dangerous options could give you a higher quantity, but might also damage the ship, injure or kill some of your crew. Some options can only be selected if you’ve built a specific room, or researched a specific technology. There’s an element of RNG, but I don’t think its a huge problem. There are lots of POIs and you have limited exploration time and limited storage capacity, so I mostly just chose the safe options, unless I was really running low on that resource. I feel like a bigger problem is that I saw the same POIs repeat very frequently, which eventually feels boring.
• You probably won’t be able to visit every POI and gather all the available resources because of some large morale penalties. There’s a permanent “homesick” penalty, which increases after every sector. And after a certain number of turns have passed, Chakotay will say that you’ve “spent too much time in this sector”, which adds another penalty that increases over time and only goes away when you progress to the sector. If your morale reaches zero, the crew will mutiny, resulting in game over. Other morale penalties are caused by not having enough quarters for every crew member, having injured crew, and if the crew can’t eat because the mess hall is offline or you run out of food.
• This encourages the player to complete the main quests as quickly as possible, however this mechanic isn’t as bad as it first appears. Getting the holodeck online provides a big morale boost (which can be upgraded further through research), so I was usually able to spend some time at the end of each chapter to fully repair the ship and fill up my cargo bays with resources before moving on.
• Starship combat is quite basic, as you’ll mostly just watch the fight happen while selecting a few commands. If Voyager is fighting against multiple enemy starships, the player can select which ship to target. You can also specifically target their shields, weapons, engines, or warp core. Phasers fire automatically, but you can choose when to fire torpedoes. Your shields are divided into four sections, and if one section goes offline you can choose to defend that section which will point it away from the enemy. Before battle starts, you can select three crew members who have special abilities which can be activated during the fight. For example, Paris can use evasive manoeuvres, while Tuvok can fire phasers more often. B’Elanna was my MVP though, because she can instantly restore all shields to maximum.
• Away missions are also quite basic. You’ll need to select three of the main crew members, who each have different specialisations, such as combat, engineering, medical, science, piloting, or diplomacy. The mission then progresses through a few stages where you’ll need to choose between different options and successfully pass a skill check, which also involves some RNG. If you fail the check, the crew member might be hurt, or the entire mission could fail. Ultimately I wasn’t really role playing or making choices based on the story, I just picked the stat with the highest number to get the best chance of success.
[h1]Story (medium quality)[/h1]
• Features all of your favourite Voyager crew members (and Neelix), and you’ll encounter familiar enemies including the Kazon, Borg, Species 8472 and Hirogen.
• The Voyager storyline itself is good, (certainly better than a lot of new Star Trek shows like Picard, Discovery, and Starfleet Academy), as this crew must survive harsh conditions, with no support from Star Fleet, while just trying to get home. However, I think the quest storylines in this game were too short. I think I spent much more gameplay time visiting POIs and gathering resources to keep the ship operational.
• Although the start of each sector features a personal log for Tuvok and Tom Paris, voiced by the actors from the TV show, sadly there’s no voice acting at all during the actual quests.
• During some quests you can make important choices which can potentially change how the storylines play out, although I don’t remember what Janeway’s actual decisions were. Sometimes the bridge crew didn’t like my decisions (I’m guessing those were the times where I went off script), but other than a one off morale penalty there were no lasting consequences.
• I like that at the very start of the game you can choose to just go home immediately by using the same technology that stranded Voyager in the first place.
[h1]Technical (medium quality)[/h1]
• It took me 30 hours to finish the story.
• I didn’t have any problems with bugs, crashes or framerate.
[h1]Recommendation[/h1]
Across the Unknown is a good game. It definitely has some flaws, but Star Trek fans, and especially Voyager fans, should enjoy the opportunity to take command, customise your starship, and make your own choices along the journey home. Worth picking up on a sale.
