Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown gives you the chance to do things a little bit differently. Stranded on the other side of the galaxy with who knows what lying between them and a return to Federation Space, some 70,000 light years away, it’s a journey that tested the crew of the Voyager no end, challenging their ideals, their willingness to do the right thing by Federation standards, and to overcome the dangers in their way. But what if you were slipped into the Captain’s jumpsuit, instead of Kate Mulgrew? It’d probably be a different fit, and you might make some rather different decisions.
Let’s be honest, Star Trek: Voyager wasn’t the best of 90s Star Trek – that’s Deep Space 9 by a country parsec – and the writers hitting episodic reset button each week on the TV series didn’t let them deliver on the idea of being trapped decades from home and needing to do everything just to persist – something that Battlestar Galactica’s reboot did quite a bit better. But it absolutely had its moments. The strength of Kathryn Janeway’s leadership shone through, the eventual addition of Seven of Nine, and heck, I’m sure there’s a number of strong narrative arcs with the Borg, Species 8472, and more, all building up to a blockbusting conclusion.
Across The Unknown starts at the very beginning of the journey, presenting the entirety of the opening two-part episode, Caretaker, to act as an introduction and tutorial for the game’s take on the story and how Gamexcite has built the narrative around new decision points, ship management and space exploration.
The first element here is really how the narrative is told to you, distilling the original screenplays and episodes into dialogue text boxes and back and forth scenes in the ship’s bridge, amongst other locations, as well as quick narrative paragraphs alongside painterly stills from the TV series. Within that, you’ll often get the ability to choose how to proceed, whether it’s with optional extra dialogue to dig deeper into a subject, a decision on what path to take, or simply coming up to a key story moment and needing to say if you’re ready to go ahead or not – you’re seemingly given plenty of time to prepare instead of being forced into encounters.
Beaming an away team down to the Array, and later on down to the dustbowl planet at the behest of Neelix, you’re able to choose the composition of the group. Tuvok is great as a Security Officer, providing leadership and the ability to blast in and out of a situation with phasers, while Harry Kim is better for science, and Neelix or Kes might bring more local knowledge and options in some situations. You’re clued in on the particular character traits that will be valuable through a series of skill checks, but then at each stage you need to decide which character (or characters) to lean on, aware that they will then be fatigued and less useful for the next story point.
Failure on any of these skill checks comes with consequences big and small. Early on in an away mission it might just be thematic – the Kazon choosing to fire in your direction before backing off if you defy them – but later on it could be that a heated phaser fire exchange sees a character wounded and needing to rest up in the sick bay. Of course, through this opening story section, it feels like the stakes are lowered, but it was interesting that, given the option to try and rescue some of the Maquis from the Caretaker, I ended up with Kim and Torres coming back to Voyager, with Paris and Chakotay kept hostage.
Much of the ship is deactivated and damaged in the opening events of the story, alongside many other parts of the ship, as life support is knocked out across a bunch of decks. Where that can be hand-waved away with some plotting in the TV series, here it’s an integral part of the survival experience. The ship is viewed from the side on like an ant farm or the base view in XCOM, and one of the first priorities for you is to assign maintenance crews to repair existing mission critical rooms, clear debris, and build some emergency crew quarters.
This all takes time and resources, so you’ll be scouring each star system for some of those Star Trek-y elements and compounds. Deuterium is plentiful, but your Warp Core absolutely chews through it to provide power to ship systems, and running out leaves you on battery power alone. Then there’s a few elements needed for construction and repairs, science points for research, and eventually some Borg points.
Even as you’re getting things like phaser banks and the shuttle bay back up and running, you can already start to research improvements and new rooms. Hydroponics will help feed your crew without draining the replicator, an additional cargo bay that’s upgraded can seriously boost the amount of resources you can bank for when you need them, there’s hull upgrades, cycling shields, and more.
You can choose to rebuild Voyager in multiple ways, either looking to embrace science, discovery and research, or arming yourself to defend in combat, and then using this to feed into your decision making through narrative points. I’ve no doubt that the Holodeck taking up a whopping nine spaces on the ship will be a sore spot, when battling for space against
Combat presents you with a pausable abstraction, where you issue commands for who and what part of a ship to target, and make use of your named characters’ abilities. You can set three of these to be active, with Tuvok doubling phaser blasts and Harry Kim able to disrupt enemy shields being a good starter combo. As you chip away at enemy shields, you’ll then be able to manually blast with torpedoes.
This section felt a bit woolly to me, partly because the camera felt a bit too close, and the ship movements a bit too rapid – they should feel like naval ships, gliding past and making graceful arcs, a la The Wrath of Khan – but also because defeating the Kazon fleet didn’t actually cause the ships to blow up or retreat. I just got a victory screen at the end. Hopefully this is cleared up for the full game.
In general, I also feel like the UI needs a bit of sprucing up and rationalising. The ship, system and galactic maps are all quick and easy to flick between, but research is separate in a lightly annoying way and you can only back out by hitting Escape. The success predictor for skill checks also uses two shades of yellow to mean critical success and mild failure in different situations. I also just wish that work crews would be freed up as soon as they’ve finished construction, instead of needing me to acknowledge a room has been cleared. Oh, and can I not just relocate a room, instead of scrapping it?
I think it will be fascinating to see just how much of the show’s seven seasons has ended up being recreated for this game. I expect that most of the highlight episodes found across the many watch lists found online will have been captured, while most of the filler and utter dross like Threshold is left behind. Alright, so it would be pretty funny to leave lizard Janeway and Paris to their new lives as lizard parents, but then who would be Chakotay’s first officer? Harry Kim? Are we sure we really want that?
All in all, I enjoyed this first look and demo for Star Trek: Voyager – Across The Unknown and am certainly intrigued to see how it takes the strong concept and the series’ high points, and forms them into something new and potentially rather different.
